Sukhum Fortress (Sebastopolis)

Interesting facts

Sebastopolis grew from Dioscurias, a Greek colony founded by settlers from Miletus in the mid-sixth century BC.

According to legend, Dioscurias was founded by the divine twins Castor and Pollux, the Dioscuri, who gave the city its name.

The Roman name Sebastopolis comes from Sebastos, the Greek form of 'Augustus', and was adopted under the first Roman emperor.

Much of the ancient city has sunk beneath the Black Sea, and divers have found remains of towers and walls of Sebastopolis underwater.

In 542 the Romans themselves pulled down the citadel and evacuated the town so it would not fall to the Persians; Justinian rebuilt the walls in 565.

The Ottoman name Sohum-Kale combined the town's older name with 'kale', the Turkish word for fortress.

In the 1830s the fortress was ringed by malarial swamps and its garrison drank foul water, until the marshes began to be drained in the early 1840s.

By the mid-nineteenth century the fortress was a regular square of high, thick walls entered by two gates, one on the east and one on the west.

In the uprising of 1866 about 2,000 insurgents seized the town; the besieged garrison was saved only by a relief force of some 8,000 men.

Why it is worth it

The fortress on the seafront of Sukhum is layered history in the most literal sense: Roman, Byzantine, medieval, Ottoman and Russian walls stacked on one another at the point where the Dioscurias embankment becomes the Makhajirs embankment. It began in the second century AD as Sebastopolis, a Roman coastal fort. A stone slab found in its wall in the 1980s names Flavius Arrian, the traveller and writer sent by Emperor Hadrian, who inspected the fort in 134, walked its wall and ditch, and left the inscription behind.

Sebastopolis grew into a trading town from the later second century – excavations have produced imported amphorae, red-glazed ware and glass alongside local pottery – and lost its importance by the end of the fifth. Its walls were destroyed in the Iranian–Byzantine wars of the sixth century and rebuilt under Justinian, then altered again between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries. Under Ottoman rule the fortress became Sukhum-Kale, rebuilt with an inscription over its gate, and in the late eighteenth century it was the residence of the Abkhaz ruler Keleshbey Chachba, who was killed in 1808. Russian troops took it in 1810.

The nineteenth century gave it harder associations. In 1866 insurgents from north-western Abkhazia besieged the Russian garrison here, and three of their leaders were shot by its walls that December. After the Russo-Turkish war of 1877–1878 the fortress became a prison, whose inmates during the revolution of 1905–1907 included Sergo Ordzhonikidze. Today the ruined walls stand right on the waterfront – a reminder that the easy-going resort town sits on nearly two thousand years of frontier.

Getting there

The fortress is on the Sukhum waterfront, a short walk from the city centre, reached by Voronov and Abazinskaya streets. Sukhum's airport (SUI) is about 18 km away; many visitors instead travel along the coast from Sochi International Airport (AER).

Sukhum Fortress (Sebastopolis)

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

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