History of Anapa

The history of Anapa was built up in layers: on a single stretch of coast Greek colonists gave way to Genoese merchants, Ottoman pashas and Russian officers — and each of them left a stratum behind. The sand and shingle of the northwestern Caucasus still hold the traces of an ancient city, a Turkish fortress, a frontline hospital and Russia’s first children’s sanatorium. A half-hour stroll along today’s seafront passes over all of those eras at once.

From the Sindi to Gorgippia

The first settlement on the site of present-day Anapa appeared in the 6th century BC: on a convenient bay between the mouth of the Kuban and the foothills, a trading harbour grew up belonging to the Sindi — a settled farming people whose capital was called, simply, the Sindian Harbour. Greek colonists from the Bosporus arrived later, in the 4th century BC, and folded the Sindian port into the orbit of the Bosporan Kingdom. The town received a new name — Gorgippia, after the royal governor Gorgippus, brother of the Bosporan ruler Leucon I.

For the Bosporus, Gorgippia became the key gateway to the inland steppes and to the Black Sea coast of the Caucasus. Through its quays flowed grain from the Sindo-Maeotian plains, slaves, livestock and fish; back the other way came wine, olive oil, painted pottery and metal from the Hellenic islands. The town minted its own coinage, had a theatre, a gymnasium, a well-kept necropolis and quarters of wealthy merchants with coloured frescoes on the walls. Ancient Gorgippia covered some forty hectares — a very respectable scale for the Pontic coast.

By the middle of the 3rd century AD that measured order came to an end. Around the 240s the town fell to nomadic raiders — most likely Gothic and Sarmatian bands moving along the edges of the collapsing ancient world. Gorgippia was never revived: its harbour silted up with sand, its quarters grew over, and its name dropped out of use for more than a thousand years. Today this cultural layer is exposed right in the centre of the modern city — at the open-air “Gorgippia” museum-reserve you can see paved streets, the foundations of houses, drains and sarcophagi, and the collection holds more than forty thousand objects of ancient material culture.

Mapa, Anapa and the Ottoman fortress

After the fall of the ancient city the coast did without any major settlement for several centuries. In the 14th century Genoese merchants gained a foothold on the ruins of Gorgippia and founded a small trading post called Mapa — one of the factories through which Genoa controlled the eastern part of the Black Sea. It is from this name, distorted by Turkic languages, that the modern “Anapa” comes: one widespread version traces the toponym to the Adyghe “anape” — “projection”, “edge of the table” — after the characteristic shape of the cape above the bay.

In 1475 the Genoese factories along the Caucasus coast were crushed by the Ottoman Empire. For the next three centuries Anapa lay in Istanbul’s orbit: first as a small port, then as one of the most important Turkish bases on the north-eastern Black Sea. As Russia pushed out to the Black Sea coast in the 18th century, the importance of this headland for the Ottomans only grew: from here it was convenient to supply the Circassian tribes and to hold the line at the approach to the Sea of Azov.

In 1781–1783, by order of Sultan Abdul Hamid I, the Anapa position was rebuilt as a modern bastion fortress. The design was drawn up by French military engineers headed by André de Lafitte-Clavé — at this time the Ottoman Empire was actively hiring foreign specialists to modernise its fortifications. The result was a powerful ring of walls with gates, a moat and artillery positions on the high shore, covered from both sea and land. In Russian military literature of the 18th and 19th centuries Anapa is mentioned as one of the strongest Ottoman fortresses in the region.

The Russo-Turkish assaults and annexation by Russia

From this point on, for decades Anapa turned into a military stage. The Russo-Turkish wars of the late 18th and early 19th centuries brought Russian troops up to its walls several times: the campaigns of 1788, 1790, 1791, 1807, 1809 and 1828 entered military history as heavy assaults that required a naval blockade and a siege of many days.

In 1791 the fortress was taken by the corps of General Ivan Gudovich — one of the more conspicuous Russian successes of that war, paid for at considerable cost. Under the terms of various peace treaties Anapa repeatedly went back to the Ottomans and then again to Russia, remaining a disputed point. In 1807 it was taken once more, this time by Russian sailors; in 1809 it was besieged again; each time the fortress was rebuilt and rearmed.

The decisive year was 1828: in the course of yet another Russo-Turkish war, the Black Sea squadron under Vice-Admiral Alexei Greig and a land force led by Adjutant-General Alexander Menshikov took the fortress for good after a six-week siege. A year later, on 2 September 1829, the Treaty of Adrianople secured Anapa for the Russian Empire together with the eastern coast of the Black Sea from the Kuban to the mouth of the Kodor.

Straight after annexation the fortress was not dismantled — it remained a Russian garrison on a restless Caucasian line. The only surviving fragment of those fortifications is the Russian Gate, a stone arch with a memorial plaque set up in 1854 for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the annexation. Today it is the oldest object in the historical fabric of the city.

From provincial town to the first children’s sanatorium

By the middle of the 19th century the fortress was gradually losing its military significance: the border of the Russian Empire was shifting deeper into the Caucasus. On 15 December 1846, by a decree of Emperor Nicholas I, the fortress of Anapa was transformed into a town. At first this “conversion” looked modest: low daub-walled houses under reed roofs, no regular layout, no water supply, dusty unpaved streets and a handful of state buildings. The population came to a few thousand — mostly the garrison, retired soldiers and settlers from the Kuban.

The turning point came at the turn of the century, and it is linked with one man — the physician Vladimir Adolfovich Budzinsky, later to be called “the father of the Anapa resort”. A graduate of Moscow University, Budzinsky noticed a combination unlike anything on the Russian coastline of the day: a shallow sandy seabed, the silt muds of the Kizyltash estuary, springs of mineral water at Semigorye, and a mild seaside climate without the heat of the southern Crimean coast.

On 15 June 1900 Budzinsky opened his first sanatorium, “Beregovaya” — the official date of birth of the Anapa resort. In 1909 a second sanatorium appeared, at Peski, later turned into an orthopaedic institute; in 1913 came a third, at Semigorye, beside the mineral-water spring. From the outset Budzinsky insisted on the central idea: the resort had above all to be a children’s one. So began the functional specialisation that Anapa carries to this day.

By the start of the First World War the town was already taking in thousands of holidaymakers in season, had a network of guest houses, a balneo-mud-therapy clinic and the reputation of “Russia’s children’s health resort”. The Revolution and the Civil War, as everywhere in the South, interrupted that trajectory: the clinics were requisitioned, many buildings fell into decay. By the end of the 1920s Soviet rule had restored the resort infrastructure under a state flag — Anapa was brought into the system of trade-union and departmental sanatoriums.

The war and the modern resort

The Great Patriotic War reached the Anapa coast in the summer of 1942. On 31 August 1942 German bombers appeared over the town every hour; by the evening of that same day the forward units of the Wehrmacht entered Anapa. The occupation lasted 385 days — until 21 September 1943.

Strategically, Anapa was critically important to the German command: its port remained the only point on the Caucasus coast through which the Taman grouping was supplied by sea and kept in contact with Crimea. For that reason the town was heavily fortified, and in the summer of 1943, retreating from the North Caucasus, the Germans built a defensive belt on the Taman Peninsula — some 113 kilometres along the front and up to 30–40 kilometres deep. Heavy fighting of the Novorossiysk–Taman operation was waged for this line.

The liberation of Anapa was part of that operation: on 21 September 1943 Soviet troops entered the town, and over the coast one of the largest air battles of the war played out in the sky. By various accounts, more than four thousand Soviet soldiers were killed in the fighting for the town’s liberation. Of pre-war resort Anapa only ruins were left — most of the sanatoriums, clinics and residential quarters had been destroyed.

The rebuilding took up the second half of the 1940s and the 1950s. By the end of the fifties the resort was working again, and in the 1960s and 1970s its second birth began — now as an all-Union children’s resort. Pioneer camps, children’s health centres and new sanatoriums went up along the Pioneer direction north of the centre — where today Dzhemete and Vityazevo are growing. In this period the landscape familiar to several generations of Soviet families took shape: a sandy beach, a seafront with a balustrade, the buildings of Pioneer camps among greenery, seashells in the kiosks.

After 1991 Anapa followed the same path as most Soviet resorts: the state network of sanatoriums shrank, and in its place a private sector rose up — guest houses, mini-hotels, restaurants, water parks. By the early 2000s the town already combined the role of a mass summer resort with the medical specialisation inherited from Budzinsky’s day: sanatoriums working with the muds of the Kizyltash estuary and the “Semigorskaya” drinking water operate year-round.

In 2007 Anapa’s status as a therapeutic territory was reinforced by a federal decision to include it in the list of resorts of federal significance. Four years later, a military-historical page was added to the resort one: by a decree of the President of the Russian Federation of 5 May 2011, Anapa was awarded the honorary title of “City of Military Glory” — for its defence and liberation during the Great Patriotic War and for the repeated assaults on the fortress during the Russo-Turkish wars. The certificate was presented on 22 June of that year, and in May 2013 a stele was unveiled at the entrance to the town with bas-reliefs divided into two epochs — the “fortress” one and the “wartime” one.

Today Anapa lives in several registers at once: the ancient excavation of Gorgippia in the city centre, the Ottoman arch of the Russian Gate, the Soviet seafront, the sanatoriums of the Pioneer Avenue, new residential quarters along the road to Vityazevo airport. On a comparatively small stretch of coast twenty-six centuries of history have fitted in, and almost every era can be walked through on foot in a single evening.