According to one version, which nowadays doesn't enjoy much currency, the English name of the country (which is called Sakartvelo in Georgian) is Greek in origin and means agriculture.

There was also a high degree of intermarriages between noble families, and several Georgian aristocratic houses, such as the Andronikashvili, claimed Pontic Greek descent.

This movement was reinforced in the early 1600s by the growing power along the coastal valleys districts of the derebeys ('valley lords'), which further encouraged Pontic Greeks to retreat away from the coast deeper into the highlands and up onto the eastern Anatolian plateau, before some moved further east into the neighbouring Lesser Caucasus around Kars and southern Georgia.

As a result, many Pontic Greeks felt pressured into following their cousins who had left Pontus as refugees in previous generations, and so they too decided to migrate to southern Russia or neighbouring Georgia and the South Caucasus.

[14] However, the largest number of Pontic Greeks who settled in Georgia according to widely attested documentary evidence did so in the early modern period and first half of the 19th century.

In 1763, 800 Greek households from the Ottoman Empire’s Gümüşhane Province were transplanted by King Heraclius II of Georgia to develop silver and lead mining at Akhtala and Alaverdi (now in Armenia).

[21] As a result, their number dropped to 15.166 (3,792 of them living in Tbilisi) as of the 2002 Georgia census (which does not include the data from a large part of breakaway Abkhazia).

The Soviet authorities referred to them as greki, although in their own Greek dialect they called themselves Romaioi, meaning they were descendants of the Roman empire of Byzantium.

[27] After World War II, ethnic Greeks of the Abkhaz ASSR were deported from 1949-1950 on the order of Joseph Stalin who referred to them as "stateless cosmopolitans".

[30] Until thirty years ago Greeks made up 70% of the 30,000 strong population of the Georgian city of Tsalka and villages in the surrounding plateau.