Official name: The Colchis Special Economic and Humanitarian Territory. Locals call it the Zone.
The Zone sits on the eastern shore of the Black Sea, wedged between the Caucasus to the north and east and open water to the west and south. It is about 150 kilometres of coast and perhaps 90 inland, on the old ground of a post-Soviet breakaway state that spent a decade in low-grade war. Georgia never recognised that state, or the Charter that replaced it, and its government wants the Zone back under its flag. In 2004 a consortium of Patriot-linked financiers bought the exhausted territory outright through the Colchis Charter. The Charter set up a free port, suspended national law, banned any standing army and handed security to licensed PMCs under a Licensing Board. It was a laboratory for the privatised war economy and it worked beautifully for ten years. When the Patriots fell, the Charter's paymaster vanished. The Board still exists. It simply has no money, no muscle, and no one who takes its licences seriously.
About three and a half million people live here, most of them in or around the capital. The climate is humid-subtropical on the coast, with warm wet autumns and fog banks off the sea, and turns to hard alpine cold above two thousand metres.