Georgia (country)

• 1. Introduction

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  Georgia sits at the crossroads of Eastern Europe and West Asia, a country of 3.9 million people whose language bears no relation to any other language family on earth. Georgians call their homeland Sakartvelo, a name rooted in the ancient region of Kartli, recorded from the 9th century. The rest of the world uses a name that traces back to a Persian term, Gurj, meaning roughly "land of wolves" filtered through centuries of crusaders, Genoese merchants, and Christian pilgrims who associated it with Saint George. Those two parallel names hint at a deeper truth about this country. Georgia has always been something the world projected onto, traded through, invaded, and annexed. And yet the people inside it have persisted, speaking their impossible language, pressing grapes into wine since roughly 6000 BCE, the earliest known winemaking anywhere on earth. This documentary asks how a small mountain nation survives at the collision point of empires, how it rises to a Golden Age and then watches that age shatter, how it finds independence only to lose it, and what it means to be Georgian at all.

• 2. The Language and the Name

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  Georgian is a Kartvelian language with no demonstrated kinship to any other language family in the world. Georgians call themselves Kartvelebi, a term first attested in the Umm Leisun inscription found in the Old City of Jerusalem, dated to the 5th or 6th century. That inscription predates by centuries the first appearance of the name "Georgia" in Western sources. The earliest written occurrence of that name is in Italian, on the mappa mundi of the Venetian cartographer Pietro Vesconte, dated 1320. The traveller Jacques de Vitry thought the name derived from the Georgians' devotion to Saint George. Jean Chardin proposed it came from the Greek word for "tiller of the land." Modern scholars instead derive it from the Persian Gurj, borrowed into Byzantine Greek and then into Slavic and Western European languages during increased contact in the Crusades and Black Sea trade. The Georgian constitution of 1995 makes the official English name "Georgia" explicit in Article 2, but in Georgian the country remains Sakartvelo, and in Abkhaz it is rendered as Kərttʷʼəla. In 2020, Lithuania became the first country in the world to adopt Sakartvelas, a variant of the native name, in all official communications.

• 3. Deep Roots

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  The oldest traces of archaic humans found in what is now Georgia date from approximately 1.8 million years ago, in the form of the Dmanisi hominins, a subspecies of Homo erectus and the oldest-known hominin fossils in Eurasia. Buffered by the Caucasus range and the Black Sea ecosystem, the region appears to have served as a refugium throughout the Pleistocene. Settlements in what is now Georgia were also responsible for the first known use of fibers, possibly for clothing, more than 34,000 years ago. Signs of agriculture reach back to at least the 6th millennium BCE, especially in western Georgia. Gold mining began in the 3rd millennium BCE. By the time Greek mythology placed the Golden Fleece in the western Georgian kingdom of Colchis, archaeological evidence already pointed to a wealthy kingdom there as early as the 14th century BCE, with an extensive trade network along the eastern Black Sea shore. Eastern Georgia, meanwhile, became the Kingdom of Iberia under the protectorate of the Seleucid Empire. In 337, King Mirian III adopted Christianity as the state religion of Iberia, beginning the Christianization of the wider Caucasus region.

• 4. The Golden Age

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  King David IV, who reigned from 1089 to 1125, transformed the Georgian kingdom by suppressing the power of feudal lords and centralizing authority. In 1121, he decisively defeated much larger Turkish armies at the Battle of Didgori and abolished the Emirate of Tbilisi, which had controlled the city for centuries. His great-granddaughter Tamar, who reigned from 1184 to 1213, is considered the most successful ruler in Georgian history. She was given the title "king of kings" and became the first female ruler of Georgia. Tamar extended Georgia's empire across large parts of present-day Azerbaijan, Armenia, eastern Turkey, and northern Iran, and used the vacuum of power left by the Fourth Crusade to create the Empire of Trebizond as a Georgian vassal state. This early Georgian renaissance, which preceded its Western European equivalent, left a legacy of great cathedrals, romantic poetry, and the epic poem The Knight in the Panther's Skin, regarded as a national epic. The kingdom's decline came quickly after Tamar's era. Tbilisi was captured and destroyed by the Khwarezmian leader Jalal ad-Din in 1226, followed by the Mongol invasions. George V the Brilliant, who reigned from 1299 to 1302, reunited eastern and western Georgia and restored the country's Christian culture. After his death, the kingdom fragmented and by 1466 had collapsed into anarchy, splitting into three independent kingdoms and five semi-independent principalities.

• 5. Russian Absorption

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  By the end of the 18th century, incessant Ottoman and Persian wars had reduced Georgia's population to 784,700 inhabitants. In 1783, the eastern Georgian kingdom of Kartli-Kakheti signed the Treaty of Georgievsk with Russia, which made Georgia a Russian protectorate and guaranteed its territorial integrity and its Bagrationi dynasty. Russia promptly violated those guarantees. In 1795, the Iranians invaded and sacked Tbilisi, massacring its inhabitants, while Russia rendered no assistance. Then in 1801, Russia annexed eastern Georgia outright, abolished the Georgian royal Bagrationi dynasty, and stripped the autocephaly from the Georgian Orthodox Church. The full incorporation was formalized when Tsar Alexander I confirmed it on the 12th of September 1801. The Bagrationi royal family was deported. One descendant, Pyotr Bagration, later joined the Russian army and became a prominent general in the Napoleonic wars. The last Imeretian king, Solomon II, died in exile in 1815. Russian rule brought Georgia security from external attack but imposed heavy-handed administration. By the late 19th century, a national revival movement had emerged, led by Ilia Chavchavadze. Social upheaval followed, culminating in the Revolution of 1905. In 1906 and 1907, Georgian nationalists carried out the Dusheti treasury heist and Bolsheviks organized the Tiflis bank robbery, two incidents that signaled the violence to come.

• 6. Independence, Lost and Regained

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  Georgia declared independence on the 26th of May 1918, becoming an ally of the German Empire. The Democratic Republic of Georgia was among the first countries in Europe to grant women the right to vote, enshrined in its constitution, which was described as "unusual in most European constitutions at the time." Several women of varying backgrounds were elected to the Georgian parliament. The Menshevik Social Democratic Party won the parliamentary election, and its leader Noe Zhordania became prime minister. France, the United Kingdom, Belgium, and Poland continued to recognize Zhordania as the legitimate head of the Georgian government through the 1930s. In 1920, Soviet Russia recognized Georgia's independence with the Treaty of Moscow, then discarded that treaty the following year. The Red Army entered Tbilisi on the 25th of February 1921 and established a government of workers' and peasants' soviets. Georgia was incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1922. After independence returned again in April 1991, Georgia was the first non-Baltic republic of the Soviet Union to declare independence. On the 26th of May that year, Zviad Gamsakhurdia was elected president with 86.5 percent of the vote on a turnout of over 83 percent. He was deposed in a bloody coup between the 22nd of December 1991 and the 6th of January 1992. A bitter civil war followed, lasting until December 1993, while secessionist conflicts in Abkhazia and South Ossetia displaced hundreds of thousands of Georgians.

• 7. Reform and Conflict

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  The Rose Revolution of 2003 ended the presidency of Eduard Shevardnadze after international monitors concluded the parliamentary elections of the 2nd of November 2003 were marred by fraud. The revolution was led by Mikheil Saakashvili, Zurab Zhvania, and Nino Burjanadze, all former members of Shevardnadze's own ruling party. Saakashvili was elected president in 2004 and launched sweeping reforms. In 2005, his government fired the entire traffic police force, numbering around 30,000 officers, due to corruption, then rebuilt it from new recruits. In 2010, Transparency International named Georgia "the best corruption-buster in the world." The World Bank in 2012 called Georgia a "unique success" in fighting corruption. Tensions with Russia over Georgia's pro-Western orientation and its moves to reassert control over the autonomous republic of Adjara worsened throughout the decade. On the 1st of August 2008, a bomb targeted a car transporting Georgian peacekeepers. South Ossetian separatists began shelling Georgian villages that same day. On the night of the 8th of August, Georgian troops moved toward Tskhinvali, the capital of the self-proclaimed Republic of South Ossetia, and Russia launched what it called a "peace enforcement" operation. The war displaced 192,000 people, and one year after the fighting ended, around 30,000 ethnic Georgians remained displaced. Russia recognized Abkhazia and South Ossetia as separate republics on the 26th of August 2008. A ceasefire was negotiated by French President Nicolas Sarkozy on the 12th of August 2008.

• 8. Between Europe and Autocracy

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  The 2012 parliamentary election marked the first peaceful transfer of power in Georgian history, with the Georgian Dream party defeating the United National Movement. Bidzina Ivanishvili, a businessman who founded Georgian Dream, served briefly as its first prime minister, resigning in 2013, yet remained its most influential figure without holding any official position until 2018. In 2018, the Georgian Dream party backed independent Salome Zourabichvili, who became the first woman to hold the presidency in full capacity. That same year, the Constitutional Court ruled that marijuana consumption was protected by the right to free personality, making Georgia the second country in the world to legalize cannabis and the first former socialist state to do so. In March 2023, the ruling party attempted to pass a law requiring NGOs receiving more than 20 percent of their funding from abroad to register as "agents of foreign influence." A similar bill passed in April 2024. In December 2023, the European Council granted Georgia EU candidate status, but conditions were attached including free and fair elections. The parliamentary elections of the 26th of October 2024 were alleged to be irregular, triggering a political crisis. Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze then announced the suspension of Georgia's EU accession process until 2028. In 2025, the V-Dem Institute classified Georgia for the first time as an electoral autocracy, noting it had undergone one of the largest single-year democratic declines on the index.