History

Gagra is thousands of years older than its resort name. The narrow strip of shore between the sea and the slope of Mamdzyshkha was convenient for people long before the Romans and Byzantines: as early as the Upper Paleolithic, a hunters’ camp stood on the bank of the Tsikherva River, and in the third millennium BC a fishing village lived here. The sea provided food, the mountains covered the rear, and the narrow Gagra Pass — the only overland road along the Caucasian coast — turned this place into a strategic key. Whoever held the pass held both trade and war, and so the stone of the fortress walls on this stretch changed but did not disappear for nearly two thousand years.

Antiquity and the fortress above the sea

Around the first century BC, a Greek trading post called Triglit appeared on the shore. From the second century onward, it entered the Roman orbit and became known as Nitika — a small fortified point on the road from Pityus toward Sebastopolis. From the Roman era the dating of the main local fortress diverges: Abaata is variously attributed to the 4th–5th century or to the middle of the 5th century. Its thick walls of rough stone and its towers were meant to lock down the Gagra Pass. In the year 550, a battle took place on this coast, described by Procopius of Caesarea: the Byzantines took the local Trachea and razed the fortifications so that they would not fall to the Persians and their allies. Later Abaata was restored, and within its walls rose a church now known as the Church of Saint Hypatius. This pairing — “fortress and church by the sea” — is the oldest architectural core of the future city.

Genoese, Ottomans and the long decline

In the Middle Ages, the coast knew shifting masters. At the beginning of the 11th century, the Russians first appeared here: the chronicles mention the campaign of Mstislav of Tmutarakan in 1017–1022. In 1308, on the map of the Genoese Pietro Vesconte, the shore is marked by the toponym “Kakara” — that is how European cartographers heard the name of the future Gagra. In the 13th–15th centuries, Genoese ships came here, and a trading post opened within the walls of Abaata: yew wood, honey, wax and slaves went from here to the west in exchange for cloth and metal. When Byzantium fell and the Black Sea became an Ottoman lake, the trading post faded. The Turks called the settlement Baladag — “high mountain” — but under them Abaata did not revive. Evliya Çelebi in 1641 described the shore as sparsely populated and overgrown. The next century and a half was a time of mountain life, raids and rare ship calls, without urban life in the former sense.

The Russian fortress

In 1810, the Abkhazian principality became part of the Russian Empire, but the Gagra Pass long remained contested territory: mountain detachments held the gorge and harassed the coast. As a result of the Treaty of Adrianople in 1829, Russia secured its hold on the Black Sea coast of the Caucasus, and on 8 July 1830 a landing party approached Abaata: the bay was occupied, and a Russian garrison was set up in the old Genoese-Byzantine fortress. So began a short but hard military chapter: the climate was feverish, and malaria felled soldiers faster than mountain bullets. In 1835, a road was laid from Bambora to Gagra; in 1837 Emperor Nicholas I visited the fortress; and in 1841 the “Marlinsky Tower” rose on the cliff, named in memory of the Decembrist and writer Alexander Bestuzhev who had served here. During the Crimean War, the garrison was evacuated in 1855, returned in 1857, and a military hospital was established at the fortress. After the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878, the fortress finally lost its strategic significance and was abandoned. By that time, a new Novorossiysk–Batumi highway, opened in 1891, was already being laid along the coast: it was this road that would soon link the wild shore to the great empire.

The “Russian Nice” of Prince Oldenburgsky

The idea of turning Gagra into a world-class resort was first voiced in 1897 in a letter from the forester A. I. Rodichev, who drew the court’s attention to the mild climate of the bay, sheltered by Mamdzyshkha from the north. The plan was taken up by Prince Alexander Petrovich Oldenburgsky — a relative of the imperial family, a man with organizational drive and the means to match. By the decree of Nicholas II of 1901, the prince was charged with creating the Gagra Climatic Station. The task was audacious: to build on an empty shore a resort city capable of rivaling Monte Carlo and Nice. To do so it was necessary to clear malarial swamps, lay a water main, set up a power plant, build a promenade and plant a park.

Construction moved fast. By 1902, the “Gagripsh” restaurant had risen at the foot of the mountains — a wooden building in the Norwegian half-timbered style, shipped in disassembled and put together on the shore without a single nail. At the same time, Primorsky Park was being laid out: on the lowland reclaimed from malaria they planted palms, cypresses, magnolias and agaves — in time more than four hundred species of subtropical flora would gather here. On the slope of Mamdzyshkha, in 1901–1904, Oldenburgsky’s own castle was built in the Art Nouveau style, with a tiled roof and a watchtower; its silhouette can still be seen from the promenade.

On 9 (22) January 1903, the Gagra Climatic Station was solemnly opened — this date is considered the birthday of the resort city. A gala concert was held at the “Gagripsh” kursaal, garlands hung on the walls, and the guests’ yachts rode at anchor in the roadstead. Very soon the shore acquired a hydropathic clinic, hotels, a telegraph and its own outlet to the sea; in 1911 the first organized tourist steamer from Germany arrived in Gagra, and in May 1912 Nicholas II personally visited the resort. A white colonnade, a park, a dacha, a wealthy clientele — for this combination the publicists of the time called Gagra the “Russian Nice”.

The 1905 revolution reached here as well: for a brief couple of months a self-proclaimed Gagra Republic existed, suppressed by Cossack units. The prince continued the construction and development of the resort right up to 1917.

The Soviet health resort

The Civil War treated the resort harshly: the dachas stood abandoned, and the park ran wild. After Soviet power was finally established in 1921, V. I. Lenin signed a decree on the development of Gagra as a resort — from then on the dachas of the empire became sanatoriums for workers and the party elite. In the thirties the city operated as a year-round health resort: new sanatoriums opened, the promenade was clad in granite, a winter theater was set up in Primorsky Park, and Pioneer camps began operating in the surrounding area. At the same time, a wave of cinema rolled over the bay — in 1934 part of Alexandrov’s “Jolly Fellows” was filmed right here, and for the first time in history Gagra appeared on screen in an all-Union film.

The Great Patriotic War spared the city from direct bombing, but the front stood nearby in the mountains of the Caucasus: the sanatoriums were converted into evacuation hospitals, and this rear-area role shaped the postwar appearance of Gagra for years. In the fifties and sixties, the resort became one of the main all-Union health centers: people came here to take the mineral waters and to rest on the five-kilometer pebble bay. In 1985 Karen Shakhnazarov shot “Winter Evening in Gagra” here, finally cementing the resort’s image in the collective Soviet memory. By the early eighties, eleven sanatoriums, fourteen rest homes and five guesthouses were operating along the coast, and hundreds of thousands of people passed through the colonnade over the course of a summer.

The collapse of the USSR and the Georgian–Abkhaz war of 1992–1993 hit Gagra hard. On 15 August 1992 a Georgian landing party came ashore, on 19 August Georgian troops occupied the city, and fighting went on here for nearly a month and a half. On 2 October 1992 Gagra was retaken by Abkhaz armed forces; over that period the resort was badly damaged, the population fell several times over, and many buildings burned out. The nineties and the 2000s the city spent in a half-abandoned state: the colonnade peeled, the sanatoriums stood empty, and self-seeded growth sprouted in the park.

Since the mid-2000s, tourism has been slowly returning to Gagra. After a workable regime was set up at the Psou checkpoint and a direct “Lastochka” train was launched from Adler, vacationers from Russia have been coming here again — the facades of the dachas are being repaired, “Gagripsh” is being restored, the colonnade is being rebuilt, and a museum operates at Abaata fortress. Today’s Gagra has a double biography: an ancient fortress above the beach and an early-20th-century resort ensemble along a five-kilometer bay, which people are once again learning to see as a resort of the very scale that Prince Oldenburgsky envisioned.