The Teen-Age Brides of Georgia

Megi, at sixteen years old, looks like any schoolgirl in love as she embraces a lanky young man, smiling and whispering up at him. Samaia, one year older, has inquisitive eyes, and looks like she ought to be doing her homework. But these teen-agers, two of the nine girls whose lives the photojournalist Myriam Meloni documented during a trip to the Republic of Georgia earlier this year, are also wives—among the estimated seventeen per cent of Georgian women who marry before the age of eighteen.