Georgia

From the land of the Golden Fleece to a Caucasian crossroads facing west.

Georgia's story begins in the ancient kingdoms of Colchis, the land to which Greek myth sent Jason and the Argonauts in search of the Golden Fleece, and Iberia, the eastern realm whose king Mirian III adopted Christianity through the preaching of St Nino in the fourth century, making Georgia one of the world's oldest Christian states. A unified kingdom reached its golden age under David IV 'the Builder' and Queen Tamar in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, a flowering of architecture, learning and the verse of Shota Rustaveli now embodied in the UNESCO monuments of Mtskheta, Gelati and Upper Svaneti. Mongol, Persian and Ottoman pressure fragmented the country before the Russian Empire annexed it from 1801; a Democratic Republic of Georgia survived from 1918 until the Soviet conquest of 1921, and Soviet Georgia, birthplace of Joseph Stalin, lasted until independence was restored on 9 April 1991. Since then Georgia has weathered conflicts in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, the 2003 Rose Revolution and the 2008 war with Russia, while orienting itself firmly toward Europe and the West.