VERSANT

Getting Your Bearings
GEORGIA: Getting Your Bearings
The Basics
Gotta Have Faith
The Lay of the Land
Georgia is a strip of land in the Caucasus
region of Eurasia, just south of Russia between
the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, north of
Turkey, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. It’s a little
bigger than West Virginia and home to about
4.6 million people.
The Georgian Orthodox Church, which has
its own patriarch, Ilia Meore, was the national
religion for more than 1,500 years prior to the
Communist era, when it was all but eliminated.
But since the fall of the Soviet Union, the
church has enjoyed a huge resurgence. Today,
84 percent of the population is Orthodox.
Georgia is hemmed in by mountains: the
Greater Caucasus to the north, the Lesser
Caucasus to the south, and the Likhi Range
right down the middle. These mountain ranges
make Georgia a patchwork of different climates.
Western Georgia is mostly subtropical,
covered in lush, green rainforests. On average,
it rains there twice as much as it does
in Seattle. But Eastern Georgia is drier, like
California’s Central Valley.
6 • versant