A brief history of Georgia
Early GeorgiaIn classical times, Georgia was made up of two kingdoms: Colchis in the west and Kartli in the east and south. In the 4th century, it became the second country to adopt Christianity, when King Mirian and Queen Nana of Kartli were converted to the faith by St Nino. In the 5th century, Colchis forged relations with the Byzantine Empire, while Kartli came under Persian control. King Vakhtang Gorgasali (447–502), considered the father of the Georgian nation, forced the Persians out for a time, moving the capital from Mtskheta to Tbilisi, but the conquerors came again, this time in the form of the Arabs in 654, and then the Turks in the 11th century.
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The Turks were eventually defeated by King Davit Aghmashenebeli (1089–1125), who recaptured Tbilisi in 1122 and made it his capital. It soon became the most powerful seat in Caucasia and a centre of Christian culture. Georgia was at its most powerful under Queen Tamar (1184–1213), his great granddaughter, whose empire straddled a large part of present-day Azerbaijan and Armenia, as well as slithers of Turkey and Russia.
Conflict & division
The arrival of the Mongols in the early 13th century devastated Georgia, compounded by the Black Death and then the many conquests of Turco-Mongol conqueror Timur, who attacked Georgia a grand total of eight times in the late 14th century. Such was the impact that Georgia divided into four separate kingdoms. By the early 16th century the Ottoman Turks and the Persians were fighting over the territory and continued to do so for hundreds of years.
Enter the Russians
Russian troops first entered the Caucasus in 1770 to help liberate the area from the Turks. At the Treaty of Georgievsk in 1783, Erekle II, the then king of Kartli and Kakheti, accepted Christian Russian rule in return for protection against his Muslim enemies. Russia went on to annex all the Georgian kingdoms, and by the end of the 19th century, each was ruled by a Russian military governor. Georgia was briefly independent from 1918 to 1921, just after the Russian Revolution, but the Red Army invaded in 1922, and Georgia became part of the Soviet Union.
Independence
Georgia’s anti-Communist government led by Zviad Gamsakhurdia declared itself independent from Russia in April 1991, plunging the country into chaos. Overthrown by rebel fighters in December of that year, Gamsakhurdia fled to Chechnya and was replaced by a military council, led by Eduard Shevardnadze. This improved the county’s image overseas, but internal conflict continued, including fighting between Georgian government troops and separatist forces in Abkhazia, and a declaration of independence by South Ossetia in 1992 – a declaration still not recognised by Georgia or most international organisations.
In September 1993 Gamsakhurdia tried to recapture power from Shevardnadze, leading to a short but violent civil war in western Georgia. Gamsakhurdia died in 31 December 1993, but the conflict led to the displacement of 250,000 Georgians.
The Rose Revolution
For a decade afterwards, the country suffered from crime waves, corruption and poor infrastructure. After a suspected rigged election in November 2003, mass protest led to a bloodless coup, named the Rose Revolution after the flowers carried by the demonstrators. Shevardnadze was forced to resign and his former protégé Mikheil Saakashvili, who led the protests against him, was elected to the presidency in January 2004.
Current events
After four relatively stable years, protestors and opposition party members took to the streets in late 2007, accusing President Saakashvili’s government of corruption and authoritarianism. Saakashvili responded by dispatching riot police, declaring a temporary state of emergency, closing down a TV station owned by his political rival Badri Patarkatsishvili, and calling a snap election in January 2008, which he won with 53 per cent of the vote.
Meanwhile, the conflict between Georgia and its breakaway regions returned to the foreground, with the region of South Ossetia again demanding formal independence. As Russian forces entered the fray, Georgia declared a state of war and the conflict spread to other areas of the country, including the breakaway region of Abkhazia. Russia decided to recognise the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, a move condemned by Georgia and criticised by the international community.
Saakashvili continued to face protests and calls for resignation, and in 2013 he left power after the end of his term in office, handing the reigns over to Giorgi Margvelashvili as President and opposition coalition Georgian Dream leader Irakli Garibashvili as Prime Minister. Margvelashvili resigned in 2015 and was replaced by his foreign minister Giorgi Kvirikashvili.
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