The South Caucasus
Armenia's high point stands well south of the range the region is named after. Mount Aragats is a volcanic cone on the Armenian Highland, 4,090 metres. Georgia's Shkhara at 5,193 metres and Azerbaijan's Bazardüzü at 4,466 metres both rise on the watershed of the Greater Caucasus itself. All three declared independence within a week in May 1918, and all three had lost it by February 1921.
3 countries
- Armenia29,743 square kilometres on a high plateau, a diaspora of five million or more, and a constitution whose coat of arms shows a mountain across the border.
- Azerbaijan86,600 square kilometres between the Caucasus and the Caspian, with a capital built on an oil peninsula, a republic first proclaimed in 1918 and restored in 1991.
- GeorgiaSakartvelo to Georgians, Gruzia in Russian: 3,929,581 people counted on 14 November 2024, in a census that leaves out Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
Common questions
Questions about South Caucasus
Which countries are in the South Caucasus?
Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, on the reading this catalogue applies, which counts sovereign states with a record here. Wider readings exist. Some geographies extend the region across the main range to take in the Russian republics of the North Caucasus, and some accounts of the area include territories that are administered separately from the capitals named above and are not filed here as countries.
Is the South Caucasus in Europe or in Asia?
Both answers are in print, because the boundary between the continents is a convention rather than a measurement. The M49 standard of the UN Statistics Division files all 3 under Western Asia and says of its own groupings that they carry no political meaning. This catalogue files them under Europe, the reading the Council of Europe followed when it admitted Georgia on 27 April 1999 and Armenia and Azerbaijan on 25 January 2001.
What is the difference between Transcaucasia and the South Caucasus?
They name the same ground from opposite sides of the mountains. Transcaucasia renders the Russian Zakavkazye, beyond the Caucasus, which is how the area reads from the north. South Caucasus took over in general English use after 1991 and describes it from within. Transcaucasia survives in the historical record, where it is exact: the federative republic of 1918 and the Soviet republic of 1922 to 1936 both carried the word in their names.
Why does so little traffic cross the region from east to west through Armenia?
Because two of Armenia's four land borders are shut. Turkey closed its frontier with Armenia in 1993, and the border with Azerbaijan has been closed since the fighting of the early 1990s, which leaves Georgia and Iran as the open sides. The pipelines and the railway between the Caspian and Turkey were built through Azerbaijan and Georgia, the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan line opening in 2006 and the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway in 2017.
Are Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Nagorno-Karabakh counted in this region?
No. None of them holds a record in this catalogue, so none is counted in the figures on this page. Abkhazia and South Ossetia have been administered outside the reach of the government in Tbilisi since the early 1990s, and Russia recognised both as states on 26 August 2008 while most other governments did not. Nagorno-Karabakh was an autonomous oblast of Soviet Azerbaijan and its later status is before the International Court of Justice in two cases filed in September 2021.