Transcontinental country located in the Caucasus, at the intersection of Eastern Europe and Western Asia. It is bounded by

• the Black Sea to the west
• Russia to the north and east
• Turkey to the southwest
• Armenia to the south

• Azerbaijan to the southeast

  It covers an area of 69,700 square kilometers (26,900 sq mi), and has a population of 3.7 million people (excluding its occupied territories).

Tbilisi is its capital as well as its largest city, and is home to roughly a quarter of the Georgian population.

The country is a representative democracy governed as a unitary parliamentary republic.

During the classical era, several independent kingdoms became established in what is now Georgia, such as Colchis and Iberia. Ethnic Georgians officially adopted Christianity in the early 4th century, which contributed to the spiritual and political unification of the early Georgian states. In the Middle Ages, the unified Kingdom of Georgia emerged and reached its Golden Age during the reign of king David IV and queen Tamar in the 12th and early 13th centuries. Thereafter, the kingdom declined and eventually disintegrated under the hegemony of various regional powers, including the Mongols, the Ottoman Empire, and successive dynasties of Persia. In 1783, one of the Georgian kingdoms entered into an alliance with the Russian Empire, which proceeded to annex the territory of modern Georgia in a piecemeal fashion throughout the 19th century.