Georgia

Georgia is a unitary parliamentary republic in the Caucasus, on the Black Sea's eastern coast at the intersection of Eastern Europe and West Asia, with Tbilisi as its capital and largest city, home to over a third of the country's population. Georgia adopted Christianity as its official religion in the early fourth century under King Mirian III and experienced a Golden Age in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries under David IV and Queen Tamar, before the kingdom fragmented from the fifteenth century onward and fell under Russian imperial control beginning in 1801, losing the Bagrationi dynasty that had ruled it. The Red Army invaded and annexed Georgia on 12 February 1921, incorporating it into the Soviet Union as the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic; Georgia declared independence on 9 April 1991 and finalized it on 26 December 1991 as the Soviet Union dissolved, later adopting its current constitution on 24 August 1995. With a population of about 3.9 million, Georgia is roughly 84 percent ethnic Georgian and about 85 percent Christian, mostly of the Georgian Orthodox church, and Georgian is the official language, a Kartvelian tongue with no relation to any other language family.