Abkhazia

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Abkhazia covers 8,665 square kilometres on the eastern coast of the Black Sea, yet most of the world does not recognise it exists as a country. Five UN member states call it an independent republic. The rest of the international community calls it part of Georgia. Its population of around 245,000 lives in a place where two governments claim the same ground. One sits in the capital, Sukhumi. The other sits in exile in Tbilisi, insisting it is the only legal authority. How did a region the size of a small province come to sit at the centre of the Abkhazia conflict and of Georgia-Russia relations? Why did a war in 1992-1993 end with Georgia losing control of nearly all of it? And why does a 1994 ceasefire, signed long ago, still hold the place in an unfinished argument? The Abkhaz call their land Apsny, etymologised as a land of the soul, though the literal meaning is a country of mortals.

• 2. A Land Of Many Names

  ›

  Apsny, the Abkhaz name for the homeland, possibly first appeared in the seventh century in an Armenian text, perhaps referring to the ancient Apsilians. The Russian Abkhaziya is adapted from the Georgian Apkhazeti, and before the twentieth century English sources sometimes wrote the region as Abhasia. The Constitution of Abkhazia treats the names Republic of Abkhazia and Apsny as equivalent and interchangeable.

  Between the ninth and sixth centuries BC, the territory of modern Abkhazia belonged to the ancient Kingdom of Colchis. Around the sixth century BC, Greeks set up trade colonies along this Black Sea coast, in particular at Pitiunt and Dioscurias. Classical authors marvelled at the crowd of peoples and the great multitude of languages spoken there. Arrian, Pliny and Strabo wrote of the Abasgoi and Moschoi living somewhere on this eastern shore. In 63 BC the region was absorbed into the Kingdom of Laziǩa.

  Simon the Zealot, by an Eastern tradition, died in Abkhazia during a missionary trip and was buried in Nicopsis. His remains were later moved to Anacopia, a place that would become a capital for the principality that followed.

• 3. Empires And Princes

  ›

  Stratophilus, the Metropolitan of Pityus, sat among the bishops at the First Council of Nicaea in 325, a sign of how early Christianity reached this coast. The country was mostly Christian, its archbishop seated at Pityus, while Roman and then Byzantine power held mainly the port cities. Arrian recorded the Abasgoi and Apsilae as nominal Roman subjects, with a small Roman outpost at Dioscurias.

  In 736, Prince Leon I, fighting beside his Lazic and Iberian allies, repelled an Arab incursion led by Marwan II. That defence, and new gains in the east, gave the Abasgian princes the strength to demand more from the Byzantine Empire. Around 778, Prince Leon II declared independence with the help of the Khazars and moved his residence to Kutaisi. In this period the Georgian language replaced Greek as the language of literacy and culture.

  The Kingdom of Abkhazia flourished between 850 and 950 AD. It ended when Abkhazia and the eastern Georgian states were unified under King Bagrat III at the turn of the eleventh century. During the reign of Queen Tamar, the chronicles name Otagho as Eristavi of Abkhazia, one of the first of the House of Shervashidze, also called Chachba, a family that would rule Abkhazia into the nineteenth century.

• 4. Ottomans And The Tsars

  ›

  In 1453 the Ottomans first attacked Sukhumi, and by the 1570s they kept a garrison there. The Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi in 1641 gave the first evidence of Islam spreading in Abkhazia, though the new faith took hold more among the higher levels of society than the general population. Çelebi also wrote that the principal tribe of the principality, the Chách, spoke the Mingrelian language, a subset of the Kartvelian tongues.

  Kelesh-Bey made the first attempt to enter relations with Russia in 1803, soon after eastern Georgia joined the Tsarist empire. He was assassinated by his son Aslan-Bey in 1801. On the 2nd of July 1810, Russian Marines stormed Sukhum-Kale and replaced Aslan-Bey with his brother Sefer Ali-Bey, who had converted to Christianity and taken the name George. Abkhazia joined the Russian Empire as an autonomous principality that year, though Sefer-bey ruled only weakly, and many mountain regions stayed as free as before.

  Russia annexed Abkhazia in 1864, ending the rule of the Sharvashidze, and Prince Mikhail was forced to renounce his rights and resettle in Voronezh. Then came Muhajirism. Muslim Abkhazians, said to be as much as 40 percent of the population, emigrated to the Ottoman Empire between 1864 and 1878. Large areas were left uninhabited, and Armenians, Georgians, Russians and others moved in to resettle the vacated land.

• 5. The Soviet Reversal

  ›

  In 1921 the Bolshevik Red Army invaded Georgia and ended its short independence, and Abkhazia became a Socialist Soviet Republic with the ambiguous status of a treaty republic tied to the Georgian SSR. Between 1922 and 1926 the share of Abkhazes in the population rose from 19.8 percent to 27.8 percent, while the Georgian share fell from 42 percent to 36 percent. In 1925 a commission led by I. Azatian reported that the Abkhaz authorities under Nestor Lakoba were giving privileges to ethnic Abkhazians and ruling over Georgians, conducting nationalist policy under the guise of communism.

  In 1931 Joseph Stalin demoted Abkhazia to an autonomous republic within the Georgian SSR. The Terror of 1937-38 purged the Abkhaz elite, and by 1952 more than 80 percent of the 228 top officials and managers were ethnic Georgians, leaving 34 Abkhazes, 7 Russians and 3 Armenians. From 1939 peasant households were resettled from the rest of Georgia, and Abkhaz schools were closed in 1945-1946, forcing Abkhaz children to study in Georgian.

  After Stalin's death and Beria's execution, the policy eased, and the Abkhaz won a larger role. The Abkhazian ASSR became the only autonomous republic in the USSR whose titular language was confirmed in its constitution as official. By the late Soviet period Abkhazes held 41 percent of the seats in the Abkhazian Supreme Soviet and 67 percent of the republican ministerships, despite being only 17.8 percent of the population while Georgians made up 45.7 percent.

• 6. The Road To War

  ›

  In June 1988 a manifesto defending Abkhaz distinctiveness, known as the Abkhazian Letter, was sent to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. The Georgian-Abkhaz dispute turned violent on the 16th of July 1989 in Sukhumi, when Georgians were killed or injured trying to enroll in a Georgian university rather than an Abkhaz one. Soviet troops restored order after several days.

  In the all-Union referendum of the 17th of March 1991, while Georgia boycotted, 52.3 percent of Abkhazia's population took part and voted by 98.6 percent to preserve the Union. Georgia declared independence on the 9th of April 1991 under Zviad Gamsakhurdia. A compromise negotiated in August 1991 gave the Abkhaz 28 seats in the Abkhazian Supreme Soviet despite being 18 percent of the population, with the Georgians at 46 percent receiving 26.

  Gamsakhurdia was forced to flee in a military coup in January 1992, replaced by Eduard Shevardnadze. On the 23rd of July 1992 the Abkhaz faction declared independence from Georgia, in a session boycotted by Georgian deputies and recognised by no other country. Abkhaz leader Vladislav Ardzinba deepened his ties with hardline Russian politicians and said he was ready for war.

• 7. War And Expulsion

  ›

  In August 1992 war broke out when the National Guard of Georgia, led by Tengiz Kitovani, entered Abkhazia, declaring it wanted to free captive officials and reopen the railway. Georgian troops marched into Sukhumi with little resistance, then engaged in pillage, looting, assault and murder. The Abkhaz defeat drew in the Confederation of Mountain Peoples of the Caucasus, an umbrella group of Circassians, Abazins, Chechens, Cossacks, Ossetians and paramilitaries from Russia, including the then-little-known Shamil Basayev.

  After ten days of heavy fighting, Sukhumi was taken by Abkhazian forces on the 27th of September 1993. Shevardnadze narrowly escaped after separatist snipers fired on his hotel. In what has been called the Sukhumi Massacre, Abkhaz and North Caucasian militants committed atrocities against the city's remaining Georgians, and the killing and destruction continued for two weeks. Only the upper Kodori gorge stayed under Georgian control, until 2008.

  Before the war Georgians made up nearly half of Abkhazia's population, the Abkhaz less than a fifth. About 5,000 were killed, 400 went missing, and up to 250,000 ethnic Georgians were expelled. More than 20,000 Georgian-owned houses were destroyed. The OSCE summits in Budapest in 1994, Lisbon in 1996 and Istanbul in 1999 recognised the ethnic cleansing of Georgians by the Abkhaz forces and their allies. The population fell from 525,000 in 1989 to 216,000 by 2012.

• 8. Russia's Shadow

  ›

  On the 26th of August 2008, after the Russo-Georgian War, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev officially recognised the independence of Abkhazia. That recognition annulled the 1994 ceasefire and ended the UN and OSCE monitoring missions. On the 28th of August 2008 the Parliament of Georgia declared Abkhazia a Russian-occupied territory. Nicaragua followed in September 2008, Venezuela in September 2009, Nauru in December 2009 reportedly in return for 50 million dollars in humanitarian aid, and Syria in May 2018.

  Half of Abkhazia's budget comes from Russian funding, much of it as loans. It uses the Russian ruble, coordinates its foreign policy with Russia, and a majority of its citizens hold Russian passports through Russia's passportization policy. The 2014 Treaty on Alliance and Strategic Partnership obliged Abkhazia to coordinate foreign policy and merge its armed forces with Russia. In 2016 Abkhazia became Russia's only ally to join sanctions on Turkey. By August 2024 a Russian deputy minister said the harmonisation of Abkhaz laws with Russian ones was almost complete.

  The ethnic Georgians who remain in the Gali District live without voting rights. During the 2021 local elections only 900 eligible voters were registered there, despite 30,259 residents. Protests in November 2024 over an investment agreement with Russia led to the resignation of President Aslan Bzhania. In the election that followed in February 2025, acting president Badra Gunba was elected with 56 percent of the vote, the latest turn in a place that still answers to two capitals at once.