History of Gelendzhik

The bay around which modern Gelendzhik stands cuts deep into the shore in an almost perfect semicircle. That shape is a natural shield against storms and a convenient harbour. This is why sailors and traders settled here long before Gelendzhik appeared on any map. Over two and a half thousand years, the same stretch of coast was held in turn by ancient Greeks, an Ottoman garrison, a Russian landing force, a Cossack stanitsa, a tsarist resort and a Soviet hospital town.

Antiquity and the Middle Ages

The earliest mentions of a settlement in the Gelendzhik area date back to the 6th century BC. The Greek navigator Scylax of Caryanda, in his “Periplus of the Inhabited Sea,” names a settlement called Toricos on this stretch of the Caucasian coast. Ionian colonists from Miletus, who were looking for convenient anchorages on the route to the Cimmerian Bosporus, chose this bay as an intermediate port.

There are two versions of how the name came about: either it was carried over from Attic Thorikos in Greece, or it was a reinterpretation of a local hydronym. The town existed for at least a century and left behind fragments of pottery, coins and traces of foundations along the shoreline of the Tolstoy and Tonky capes.

After Toricos disappeared, the traces of the ancient settlement are lost. Archaeologists record a succession of tribes: the Sindi, the Kerketai, and later the Zikhi and the Circassians (Adyghe). Their cultural background goes back deep into antiquity — in the valley of the Zhane River, dolmens from the 3rd–2nd millennia BC still stand, stone structures with round entrance openings.

In the 13th–15th centuries, the eastern Black Sea coast came into the orbit of the Genoese colonies. Italian portolan charts mark anchorages along the coast used by merchants travelling from the Black Sea to the Caucasus.

After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the coast passed under Ottoman control, and in time a Turkish fortress rose above the bay. By the 18th century it served as one of the slave-trading points of the North-Western Caucasus. Captives were herded here from the mountains and shipped from here to Anatolia.

The folk etymology of the very name “Gelendzhik” is linked to the slave trade — from the Turkish “gelin,” “bride,” with the diminutive “dzhik”: “little bride.” Linguists, however, consider an Adyghe origin more credible — Khuluzhyy, meaning “small pasture”: it sounds mundane, but it matches the landscape exactly.

The Russian Fortification

In 1829, under the Treaty of Adrianople, the eastern coast of the Black Sea from the mouth of the Kuban to the port of St. Nicholas passed to Russia. To secure a foothold on the new lands, the military command began building a chain of coastal fortifications. On 28 July 1831, a Russian squadron landed a force on Tolstoy Cape in Gelendzhik Bay — more than four thousand soldiers under Major-General Yermolai Berkhman. This date is considered the official founding day of the city.

Within a few weeks, earthen ramparts, barracks and a pier rose on the shore. The garrison was almost immediately half-encircled. The mountain tribes saw the construction as an invasion, and siege followed siege. In 1839, the Gelendzhik Fortification became part of the Black Sea Coastal Line — a system of forts running from Anapa to the mouth of the Ingur, commanded by General Nikolai Rayevsky the Younger. The line was meant to cut the Circassian tribes off from Ottoman support and gradually bring the Western Caucasus under Russian control.

The history of the first fortification ended in 1854. The Crimean War had begun. At that point Russia did not have the forces to defend the long coastal line against the Anglo-French squadron. The forts had to be blown up and the garrisons evacuated. Gelendzhik was deserted. Turkish detachments briefly returned to the coast, but they were unable to establish themselves.

Cossack Stanitsa and Village

After the end of the Caucasian War in 1864, the coast finally became part of the Russian Empire. Most of the Adyghe population emigrated to the Ottoman Empire — the Muhajir migration began, leaving the mountains all but empty.

About eight hundred families were resettled onto the vacated land between Gelendzhik Bay and the Tuapse River: Kuban Cossacks and retired sailors of the Black Sea Fleet from Nikolaev. They formed the Shapsug Coastal Battalion. One of the twelve new stanitsas was Gelendzhikskaya — fifty-nine families on the site of the former fortification.

The military-Cossack administration did not last long. In 1868, the battalion’s lands were absorbed into the civilian Black Sea District, and in 1870 the battalion itself was disbanded. The stanitsa lost its military status and became a village within the Novorossiysk Department. In the same year, 1869, one of the oldest wineries in the Caucasus — “Gelendzhik” — opened in the surrounding area and is still in operation today. Viticulture and fishing then became the foundation of the local economy.

The Birth of the Resort and the Tsarist Town

By the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, people had begun talking about Gelendzhik as a place for taking the cure. The shallow bay, which warms up quickly and is sheltered from northern winds, offered favourable climatic conditions for rest. In 1900, the doctor of medicine Mikhail Sulzhinsky opened the first private “Black Sea Sanatorium” here. This date is usually regarded as the birth of the resort. Seven years later, the coast around the bay was officially granted the status of a resort area.

In 1913, for the 300th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty, the Church of the Transfiguration of the Saviour was built in the village. In the same year, a sanatorium opened for children suffering from bone tuberculosis. The village quickly filled with dachas and guesthouses, and visitors from St. Petersburg and Moscow began flocking to the coast. On 5 August 1915, by decree of Nicholas II, Gelendzhik was granted town status, and from the beginning of 1916 it switched to municipal self-government and was divided into urban and rural parts.

The 20th Century and the Present Day

The Revolution and the Civil War rolled across the coast in the same waves as across the rest of Russia: changes of power, food-requisition detachments, famine. By the end of the 1920s, however, the resort function had returned. Trade-union holiday homes were opening, and the first Soviet redesign of the seafront was under way. At that time a dirt highway was laid down linking Gelendzhik with Novorossiysk, and a pier for coastal shipping was built.

The hardest years came during the Great Patriotic War. From August 1942, when German forces took part of Novorossiysk, Gelendzhik became a front-line town. Its bay became a base for the Black Sea Fleet. Cutters and minesweepers set out from here, and field hospitals were set up here.

On the night of 3–4 February 1943, cutters carrying the landing force of Major Tsezar Kunikov set out from the port of Gelendzhik towards Cape Myskhako. The landing established the bridgehead that went down in history as Malaya Zemlya (“Little Land”). For two hundred and twenty-five days that bridgehead was supplied through Gelendzhik’s piers: fuel and ammunition went out, the wounded came back. By 16 September 1943 Novorossiysk had been liberated, and the front moved westward.

Post-war recovery was slow. The ruined resort was rebuilt by the mid-1950s. From the 1970s onwards, the town began to grow as a mass summer destination for the Kuban region. Multi-storey holiday hotels appeared, an airport was built, and the seafront promenade was extended. By the 2000s, its length had been brought to about 14 kilometres. It is now one of the longest seaside promenades in Russia.

The post-Soviet decades cemented Gelendzhik’s status as one of the leading beach resorts of Krasnodar Krai. It became more compact than Sochi and quieter than Anapa. Private parks and wineries appeared, such as the Safari Park with its cable car up the Markotkh Ridge, the Old Park in nearby Kabardinka, and “Château de Talu” on Tolstoy Cape. In 2022 the airport was closed for security reasons and stood idle for three years. From July 2025 flights have resumed, and the direct link with Moscow and St. Petersburg is once again in operation.

Over two and a half thousand years, the shore of this bay has been home to a Greek trading station, an Ottoman fortress, a Russian fort, a Cossack stanitsa and a resort town. Peoples, languages and states changed, fortresses vanished and promenades appeared — but the shape of the bay itself, the very reason the first ships once turned in here, has remained the same.