Tbilisi
Almost 10 times the size of any other city in Georgia, Tbilisi is where it all happens.
Almost 10 times the size of any other city in Georgia, Tbilisi is where it all happens.
Although Kutaisi is Georgia’s second city population-wise, the resort and port city of Batumi is in many ways the real counterweight to Tbilisi in terms of atmosphere, setting and appearance.
The southwestern corner of Georgia is a highlight of the country and intriguingly idiosyncratic: it’s humid and semitropical and has a sizable Muslim population.
Site of the ancient kingdom of Colchis, and famous as the destination of Jason and the Argonauts in their search for the Golden Fleece, western Georgia has always acted as a conduit for influences from the west into the Caucasus, from the Greeks...
The unpronounceably named southern flank of Georgia is a highly scenic region whose cultural and natural attractions have unfortunately not prevented it from becoming one of the country’s most economically backward areas.
The eastern region of Kakheti is Georgia’s wine country.
Georgia’s second city is one of the most ancient in the world.
The drive into the wilderness from Akhaltsikhe towards Vardzia is as dramatic as any in Georgia outside the greater Caucasus.
To a non-Georgian, Mtskheta’s near-mystical importance in Georgian culture is hard to describe.
The greatest tragedy to befall Georgia since its independence is the secession of Abkhazia and the bloodshed and misery that this has brought about.
Abkhazia’s capital (Sokhumi in Georgian; Sukhum or Akua in Abkhaz) has a gorgeous setting on a bay backed by hills thick with luxuriant semitropical vegetation.
Famous throughout the former Soviet Union for its salty-sour, love-it-or-hate-it carbonated mineral water, Borjomi is an attractive resort town clinging to the hills either side of the Mtkvari River, 850m above sea level.
The administrative capital of Svaneti, at an altitude of 1400m, is a conglomeration of at least 10 neighbourhoods, with old buildings and typical Svan towers mixed in among drabberSoviet-era structures.
Tucked into Georgia’s far northeast corner, with Chechnya to its north and Dagestan to its east, Tusheti is an increasingly popular summer hiking area but remains one of the country’s remotest and most fascinating and pristine high-mountain regions.
To all Georgians, Gori is synonymous with just one man: this is the town where Iosif Jughashvili – later Joseph Stalin – was born and went to school.
Impossibly beautiful, wild and mysterious, Svaneti is an ancient land locked in the greater Caucasus, so remote that it has never been tamed by any ruler, and even during the Soviet period it largely retained its traditional way of life.
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