Back to the Past
Sunday, June 27, 2004
Georgia (the country, not the state) is moving back in time - or at least it's moving time zones.
Times are a' changing in Georgia
Georgia moved closer to Western Europe on Sunday - not physically but in terms of time.
The former Soviet republic has changed its time zone back to that of Moscow.
As a result it is now just four hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time, rather than five hours ahead.
The switch was decreed by the pro-Western president of Georgia, Mikhail Saakashvili, who said the change was partly prompted by the process of integration into Europe.
In the 1990s, Georgia switched to five rather than four hours ahead of GMT in an effort to combat the effects of a national energy crisis.