History of Sirius

The history of Sirius as an independent settlement began recently: it received federal territory status in December 2020. Yet the land where the Olympic arenas and university campuses stand today has a far harsher, decidedly non-resort biography. To understand Sirius, one must look into the past of the Imeretinskaya Lowland — the triangle between the mouths of the Mzymta and Psou rivers, which for a century and a half was considered one of the most swampy, malarial and destitute places on the Black Sea coast.

The land before the Russian Empire

Until the mid-19th century, the coastal lowland between the Mzymta and the Psou was an outskirt of the Black Sea Caucasus, weakly tied to the world of the great states. Here lived the societies of the Sadz — a coastal people of the Abkhaz group whose villages stretched along the sea from the Psou further north. The landscape bore little resemblance to a resort: dense alder groves, ferns, dozens of channels and oxbow lakes of the Mzymta, mosquito-ridden marshes. Cattle were pastured here in summer, but for permanent life people chose drier plots inland.

The name “Imeretinskaya” arose thanks to the proximity to Georgia. In the late medieval and early modern eras, Western Georgia was known as the Kingdom of Imereti, and the ethnonym “Imereti” became a collective name for Georgian-speaking peoples. Regular Georgian communities on the Mzymta are not documented, but the name from Imereti was fixed to the valley later, already in the Russian era, and this is explained not by ethnography but by military toponymy.

The Caucasian War and the arrival of the empire

The key date for the entire Black Sea region is 1864. The end of the Caucasian War and the subsequent exodus of most of the local Muslim population to the Ottoman Empire — the Muhajirism — left the coast almost deserted. The Sadz societies departed across the sea together with the Ubykh and the Shapsug, the villages emptied, and the land passed to the treasury and became the object of a slow, arduous colonization.

In 1864–1866, the 157th Imeretinsky Infantry Regiment was stationed on the new border with Abkhazia. It was this regiment that gave the valley its modern name: the area between the Psou and the Mzymta began to be called the “Imeretinskaya Lowland” in staff documents, and this name was fixed on the maps forever. By the end of the 19th century, scattered farmsteads of Armenian, Greek, Estonian and Russian settlers appeared here, as well as Molokans and Old Believers. However, the development proceeded painfully: the marshy floodplain of the Mzymta swarmed with malarial mosquitoes, and the fever claimed the lives of dozens of people.

The first attempts to turn this malarial but fertile land into a flowering garden date to the early 20th century. In 1910–1911, the Yuzhnye Kultury (“Southern Cultures”) park — an arboretum with relict and subtropical plants, conceived as an ornamental park of the private estate of General Daniil Drachevsky — was laid out on the eastern edge of the lowland. Today, Yuzhnye Kultury remains one of the few witnesses of the pre-revolutionary era within the boundaries of Sirius: some of the alleys and ponds have been preserved here since the park was founded.

Old Believers, malaria, the Soviet decades

One of the most recognizable pages of local history is the fate of the Russian Old Believer Nekrasov Cossacks. Descendants of the Cossacks who left the Don at the beginning of the 18th century for a life in the Ottoman Empire, after several waves of repatriation they settled in various corners of southern Russia. One such community established itself in the village of Marlinsky — right on the sandy-pebble coastal strip. Their houses with gabled roofs, kitchen gardens and a characteristic way of life stood here for decades until, in 2011, on the eve of the Olympic construction, most of the residents were resettled in the new village of Nekrasovskoye near Adler.

The Soviet government occupied itself chiefly with land reclamation. From the 1930s and through the postwar decades, the lowland was methodically drained: drainage canals were dug, the channels of the Mzymta were tamed and the swamps were filled in. Malaria was defeated only after the war, and only then did the narrow strip by the sea gradually turn from an “empty” land into a place with hotbeds, greenhouses, citrus plantations and small state farms. Formally, all this belonged first to the Adler District, and from 1961 — to the resort city of Sochi, as part of which the Imeretinskaya Lowland remained until the very end of the 20th century. There was neither a sea resort nor sanatoriums in the customary Sochi sense here: the beaches were considered “wild,” and the resort fame belonged to Khosta, Matsesta and Kudepsta.

The Olympic transformation

Everything changed on 4 July 2007, when the International Olympic Committee, at its 119th session in Guatemala, chose Sochi as the host of the XXII Winter Olympic Games. It was decided to place the coastal cluster precisely in the Imeretinskaya Lowland: flat land by the sea, open space, proximity to Adler airport — a rare combination for mountainous terrain. Thus began one of the largest construction projects in the country of the post-Soviet period.

From 2008 to 2013, a futuristic city grew up on the site of former kitchen gardens, swampy wastelands and the village of Marlinsky. The Fisht Stadium, the Bolshoy, Iceberg and Shayba ice arenas, the Ice Cube curling center, the Olympic Village, the racetrack and the modern railway station, as well as interchanges and the combined road-and-rail highway to Krasnaya Polyana — all this appeared from scratch. The infrastructure was supplemented by a seven-kilometer promenade and the Barkhatnye Sezony residential quarter, which after the Games turned into a popular resort.

On 7 February 2014, the opening ceremony of the XXII Winter Olympic Games was held at Fisht, and a month later — the opening of the Paralympics. After the Games, a ready-made city remained on the coast that needed to be adapted to peacetime life. Already in the autumn of 2014, the first Russian Grand Prix of Formula 1 was held on the Sochi Autodrom track. The stage was held here annually up to 2021. And in 2018 Fisht hosted matches of the FIFA World Cup, including the Russia — Croatia quarterfinal.

In parallel, a major educational project grew on the Olympic legacy. In 2015, on the initiative of the Talent and Success Foundation, the Sirius Educational Center for gifted schoolchildren was opened: programs in mathematics, natural sciences, arts and sports were housed in the former Olympic facilities. Later, Sirius University with a master’s and doctoral program, the Park of Science and Art, and the Scientific and Technological University were added to the center. It was this cluster that suggested the future name of the territory.

The birth of the federal territory

By the end of the 2010s, the Imeretinskaya Lowland lived by its own rules. It possessed the country’s largest sports and educational facilities, Olympic quarters and dozens of hotels; huge federal investments were poured into it, and yet administratively it remained a distant outskirt of the Adler District. The logic of development demanded change.

The first steps toward autonomy were taken in 2019. Already on 1 February 2020, the Russian government by directive No. 171-r officially assigned the name “Sirius” to the future settlement — in honor of the educational center of the same name. After public discussions and regional approvals, by April of that year Sirius had acquired the status of an independent municipal formation.

The main document appeared at the end of the year: on 22 December 2020, the President of Russia signed federal law No. 437-FZ, by which Sirius became the first federal territory in the country’s history. This is a special status introduced by the 2020 amendments to the Constitution: the territory is withdrawn from the subordination of a federal subject (Krasnodar Krai) and receives its own bodies of authority that interact directly with the federal center. On 17–19 September 2021, the first elections to the Council of the federal territory were held.

From this moment on, the history of Sirius has proceeded as the history of a separate municipality. The population has grown from 13 thousand people (according to the 2020 census) to almost 14.5 thousand in 2025. New university campuses, laboratories and residential quarters are being built here, and the network of Lastochka train routes connecting Sirius with Adler airport, central Sochi and Krasnaya Polyana is expanding. In just under twenty years, the Imeretinskaya Lowland has made an incredible leap: from a swampy outskirt to a federal territory with Olympic arenas, a racing circuit and the country’s innovation center. This is a rare example of how the fate of an entire region changes before the eyes of a single generation.