The Abkhazians are one of the myriad indigenous ethnic groups who have been living in The Caucasus since millennia ago. They were the people referred to in Roman sources as the "Abasgoi". Their language is classified as part of the Northwest Caucasian family, making it a relative of Circassian and the now-extinct Ubykh (which had the reputation as the language with the largest inventory of consonants in the world, at over eighty).
In the ancient era, Abkhazia was part of Lazica, an ancient kingdom of the Mingrelians (ethnic cousins of the Georgians). It was conquered by the Romans, then the Byzantines, before the Georgians stepped in and decided to cut its ties with the Greeks. It subsequently became the center of the Kingdom of Abkhazia, which, despite its name, was actually a Georgian state. In the early 11th century, King Bagrat III of Abkhazia, through politics and wars of conquest, united Abkhazia with the neighboring Kingdom of the Iberians, forming the Kingdom of Georgia.
By the 16th century, Georgia had been broken into several states, and Abkhazia was among them. Following the arrival of the Ottoman Turks, the ethnic Abkhazians converted to Islam in droves. However, most of the Muslim Abkhazians were later expelled by Tsarist Russia when they conquered the region in the 19th century. It's believed that there are hundreds of thousands of Abkhazian descendants living in Turkey today, a larger population compared to the Republic of Abkhazia, although they have long been assimilated into the Turkish majority. In the aftermath of the expulsion, Abkhazia was resettled by Russia's (Christian) ethnic groups, such as the Georgians, Armenians, and the Russians themselves, leaving the Abkhazians a minority in their own land.
After the February Revolution, Abkhazia became a part of independent Georgia, which was soon absorbed into the Soviet Union. From 1921 to 1931, Abkhazia actually had the status as a Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR), making it administratively on par with Georgia itself, but since Joseph Stalin was ethnically Georgian, he eventually decided to downgrade its status to that of an Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR), an ethnic enclave within the Georgian SSR. He gave the Georgian SSR the go-ahead to conduct forceful Georgianization of Abkhazia, a decision that would come back to bite everyone's ass in the future.
When the Soviet Union started disintegrating in the late 1980s, there was a fear in Abkhazia that Georgia's independence would lead them to lose their autonomy. In 1991, Georgia declared independence under Zviad Gamsakhurdia, who managed to placate the Abkhazians through a power-sharing agreement. However, Gamsakhurdia was later toppled in a coup, and another Georgian leader, Eduard Shevardnadze, who was less-inclined to Abkhazian autonomy, became president. An all-out civil war broke out soon after, involving the Georgians under Shevardnadze, Georgian rebels under Gamsakhurdia, ethnic Abkhazians under Vladislav Ardzinba, and ethnic Ossetians under Torez Kulumbegov, the latter two of whom decided that they wanted their own countries.
After two years of war, Georgia managed to crush Gamsakhurdia's faction, but was unable to rein in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, both of which declared independence. Georgians, who made up as much as a half of Abkhazia's pre-war population of 520,000, were expelled. Russian troops were sent to patrol as peacekeepers, under an arrangement similar to the one resolving the Ossetian conflict. Georgia managed to retain the eastern Kodori Valley until 2008, when the Abkhazians occupied it while the Georgians were busy fighting the Russians over South Ossetia. Georgia has since designated Abkhazia as a Russian-occupied territory.
Fun fact: Abkhazia has the world's deepest cave, the Krubera Cave, which measures over 2 kilometers in depth.
The Abkhazian flag
Government
- Unitary presidential constitutional republic
- President: Aslan Bzhania
- Prime Minister: Alexander Ankvab
