Georgia document photos online

Long before there were Europeans, there were the people of Dmanisi. In a hilltop village 85 km from Tbilisi, archaeologists uncovered hominin skulls and stone tools dated to roughly 1.8 million years old — the earliest well-dated human ancestors ever found outside Africa, and the oldest in all of Eurasia. One cranium, D4500, is the most complete early-Pleistocene adult skull on Earth. In other words, the story of human migration into Europe begins not in Greece or Spain, but in the country whose passport you may be photographing today: Georgia, a land that has been issuing identities for travelers since 1918.

• Passport power In the 2025 Henley Passport Index, the Georgian passport ranked roughly 48th, granting its holders visa-free or visa-on-arrival access to about 103 destinations worldwide.
• Statehood Georgia first issued its own passports between 1918 and 1921 under the short-lived Democratic Republic of Georgia, decades before its modern independence.
• Independence Modern Georgia restored its statehood by referendum on 31 March 1991 and formally proclaimed the Act of Restoration of Independence on 9 April 1991, breaking from the Soviet Union.
• Citizenship Georgia's 1995 constitution generally forbids dual citizenship, so holding another passport alongside a Georgian one is allowed only in cases specifically defined by the state.
• Currency The lari, introduced in 1995, takes its name from an old Georgian word for a hoard or stored property, while its subunit, the tetri, means 'white' and traces to a coin term used in ancient Colchis as far back as the 6th century BC.
• Money reset When the lari replaced the hyperinflated kuponi in October 1995, the exchange rate was a staggering one million kuponi for a single new lari.
• Wine record Pottery residues from sites south of Tbilisi push Georgian winemaking back about 8,000 years, recognized by Guinness World Records as the oldest known evidence of wine.
• Heritage craft Georgia's qvevri winemaking, fermenting grapes in egg-shaped clay vessels buried underground, was inscribed on UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2013.
• Writing system Georgia is one of the few nations with its own alphabet — in fact three living scripts, Mrgvlovani, Nuskhuri and Mkhedruli, jointly recognized by UNESCO in 2016.