🇬🇪 Georgia
Tbilisi
Tbilisi (თბილისი — "warm place" in Georgian, named for the natural sulphur springs at the city's heart) is the capital and largest city of Georgia (population 1.2 million city, 1.5 million metropolitan), on the Kura (Mtkvari) River in a gorge between the Lesser Caucasus Mountains — the most distinctive capital city in the South Caucasus, combining the most organic urban fabric in the region (the old town of Abanotubani with the domed sulphur bath houses that have given the city its name for 1,500 years, the carved wooden balconies of the Kala district, the Metekhi cliff-church, the Narikala fortress) with the post-Soviet liberation of a country that freed itself from Moscow in 1991 and then fought a brief but defining war with Russia in 2008. Georgia is the oldest wine-making country in the world (the archaeological evidence of wine production at Shulaveri-Shomu in the Kvemo Kartli region dates to approximately 6000-5800 BCE — 8,000 years before the French wine tradition; the Georgian qvevri wine-making method (UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage 2013) uses large clay vessels buried in the earth for fermentation (as opposed to barrels or steel tanks) and the skin-contact fermentation method produces the distinctive amber (orange) wine colour unique to the Georgian tradition; Georgia has 525 indigenous grape varieties, more than any other country on earth). The Georgian food culture is among the most distinctive in the world: khinkali (the large pleated soup dumplings (the correct eating method: hold by the topknot, bite a small hole and drink the broth before eating the filling; discard the topknot); khachapuri (the cheese-filled flatbread in multiple regional varieties, the most dramatic being the Adjarian khachapuri (the boat-shaped bread with the egg and butter melted into the molten cheese)); the Georgian supra (the festive feast tradition with the tamada (toast-master) directing the sequential toasts and the polyphonic singing that UNESCO has recognised as Intangible Cultural Heritage).