History of Sochi

For millennia before the first Russian fortifications rose at the mouth of the Sochi River, peoples and cultures had been succeeding one another on this shore. The ancient geographer Strabo, writing in the 1st century AD, described the Zygii and Heniochi — highlanders who occupied the coast from Gelendzhik to the outskirts of present-day Abkhazia. Farther north lay the edge of Colchis, the very land to which the ancient Greek Argonauts sailed in search of the Golden Fleece. In the valleys around Sochi, archaeologists have uncovered Bronze Age dolmens, the remains of Byzantine churches of the 6th–10th centuries, and the medieval fortresses of the Christian kingdom of Zichia, which held the coast as late as the 13th century.

By the time Russian squadrons approached these shores, the main population of the Black Sea Caucasus consisted of the Ubykhs and the Shapsugs. Their villages stood in the valleys from Vardane to the Kudepsta River, trade with the Ottoman Empire went through coastal landings, and for a long time foreign affairs remained the business of the highland communities themselves.

Fort Alexandria and the Caucasian War

The modern history of Sochi begins on 21 April (3 May) 1838. On that day, a landing force under the command of Rear Admiral Mikhail Kumani and Major General Andrei Simborsky disembarked at the mouth of the Sochi River and laid the foundations of a fortification named in honour of Empress Alexandra Feodorovna — Fort Alexandria. Just a year later the garrison was renamed: the new name, “Navaginskoye Fortification,” appeared in memory of the Navaginsky Infantry Regiment, whose soldiers held the defences here. The fort became one of the strongpoints of the Black Sea Coastal Line, built by the empire to cut off the smuggling of weapons from Turkey to the highlanders at war.

During the Crimean War the Russian coastal garrisons had to be evacuated: British and French squadrons left the fortifications no chance. Navaginskoye was brought back into service only after the Peace of Paris. The fate of the coast was decided once and for all with the end of the Caucasian War: on 21 May 1864, in the valley of Kbaade — today’s Krasnaya Polyana — a parade of Russian troops took place and the end of hostilities in the Western Caucasus was proclaimed. For the Ubykhs and a significant part of the Shapsugs this meant the muhajirun — a mass migration to the Ottoman Empire. The coastal valleys emptied, and new inhabitants began to arrive: Armenians from Anatolia, Greeks, Estonians, Moldovans, and Russian peasant settlers. So appeared Esto-Sadok in Krasnaya Polyana, Lazarevka, Loo and dozens of other villages with the patchwork ethnic mosaic that still defines the coast today.

The Sochi Settlement and the First Resorts

In 1874 the settlement by the sea was renamed Dakhovsky Posad, after the Dakhovsky detachment of Russian troops. The familiar name returned only in 1896, when the place received the status of a posad (township) and was named Sochi, after the river. At that time it became part of the Black Sea Governorate, with its centre in Novorossiysk.

By the end of the 19th century the first well-to-do summer residents had appeared along the coast. In 1872 the Moscow merchant Nikolai Mamontov received nearly three thousand desyatinas of land near the Dakhovsky post and laid out here one of the first private gardens on the coast. In 1892 the actual state councillor Sergei Khudekov planted the “Nadezhda” park in the upper part of the settlement — the future Sochi Arboretum, with its eighteen hundred plant species. In 1898 the Moscow manufacturer Vasily Khludov founded the “Riviera” park on land that belonged to him — the oldest of the city parks. At the same time the residents of Sochi discovered the hydrogen-sulphide springs of Matsesta: the first wooden bathhouses were built there in 1902, and only a few years later the “Caucasian Riviera” boarding house opened on the shore — founded by the merchant Anton Tarnopolsky in 1909, it was the first true resort complex, with a clinic, a restaurant and its own electric lighting.

In 1917 Sochi was granted city status. The Civil War, however, set the resort back: the coast was occupied in turn by Reds, Whites and Georgian units, the dachas burned, and the sanatorium economy was ruined. The final establishment of Soviet power in 1920 opened the next chapter.

The Soviet Construction of the Thirties

The fate of Sochi as a resort was decided during the first Soviet five-year plans. In 1923 a power station at Matsesta came online; a year later a renovated balneological complex opened. In 1926 the Council of Labour and Defence adopted a decision to develop the Sochi–Matsesta resort as a facility of all-Union importance, but the real large-scale construction came later.

In 1933 the government approved a master plan for the reconstruction of Sochi, calculated for a quarter of a century. The resort was included in the list of the country’s priority construction projects and personally entrusted to the plenipotentiary of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR, Alexander Metelyov. From 1934 to 1939 nineteen new sanatoriums and boarding houses were built here, highway roads were laid, water supply and sewerage were installed, and the bay was reconstructed. The architects Alexei Shchusev, the Vesnin brothers, Ivan Zholtovsky and Miron Merzhanov lined Kurortny Prospekt with ensembles of Soviet Empire style. At the same time rose the Ordzhonikidze Sanatorium with its five buildings on the hill above the sea, the “Caucasian Riviera,” the “Metallurg,” and the new Matsesta bath complex (1940). Here, too, in Matsesta, Stalin built his “Green Grove” dacha — the coast became a retreat for the top circles of the Party.

In 1936, on Mount Akhun, a thirty-metre observation tower in the spirit of Romanesque donjons was built to a design by the architect Sergei Vorobyov; from its platform you can still see the coast from Lazarevskoye to Adler today.

The Great Patriotic War came to Sochi not in tank columns but in hospital trains. The city was turned into the largest hospital base in the country: already in the first months of the war, sanatoriums, hotels and schools were converted into hospitals. Over the course of the war, the one hundred and eleven hospitals of Sochi treated between three hundred and thirty-five thousand and five hundred thousand wounded, and more than seventy per cent of them returned to active service. For these merits, Sochi would be awarded the title of “City of Military Glory” in 2016.

The post-war years brought the resort back to its peacetime programme and gave it a new scale. In 1952, to a design by the architect Alexei Dushkin — the same man who built Moscow’s “Mayakovskaya” — the new Sochi railway station opened: a model of Stalinist Empire style with a clock tower and an arched gallery. In 1955 the Marine Terminal by Karo Alabyan and Leonid Karlik rose on the shore — a building with a seventy-one-metre spire and figures of the seasons. At the same time the “Pobeda,” “Rossiya” and “Zapolyarye” sanatoriums went up, and the resort began to receive foreign delegations and Party guests.

Greater Sochi

On 10 February 1961 the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR signed a decree expanding the city limits of Sochi. The Adler and Lazarevsky districts of Krasnodar Krai were abolished, and their territories were incorporated into the city. From that day the resort stretched for one hundred and forty-five kilometres along the Black Sea shore — from the village of Magri in the north-west to the Psou River on the border with Abkhazia. Within the city, four districts were formed — Tsentralny, Khostinsky, Adlersky and Lazarevsky — and within these boundaries it still lives today.

The 1960s through the 1980s brought the city dozens of new health resorts, the “Zhemchuzhina” hotel (1973) and the “Festivalny” concert hall (1979). The Winter Theatre, opened back in 1937, was thoroughly reconstructed. In 1991, in its auditorium, “Kinotavr” was held for the first time — a film festival that for the next thirty years would become the principal showcase of Russian cinema.

The Olympic Turn

The 1990s struck a blow to the Soviet resort model: state-issued vouchers disappeared, the sanatoriums grew old, and the infrastructure wore out. The turning point came on 4 July 2007 in Guatemala — the IOC declared Sochi the host of the XXII Winter Olympic Games. Seven years were given for preparation, along with sums unprecedented for a single city.

By February 2014, the Olympic Park had risen on the Imereti Lowland, with the forty-thousand-seat “Fisht” Stadium, the “Bolshoy” and “Aysberg” ice palaces, the “Adler Arena” speed-skating venue, and a Formula 1 circuit. In the mountains of Krasnaya Polyana, three resorts opened — “Rosa Khutor,” “Gazprom” and “Alpika” — together with a bobsleigh track and a ski-jumping complex. Between the sea and the mountains stretched a combined rail and road link: about fifty kilometres with dozens of tunnels and bridges, one of the most expensive construction projects in Russia’s history. It is along this line that the “Lastochka” train has run ever since, connecting Adler airport with Rosa Khutor in an hour.

At “Fisht” the matches of the 2018 FIFA World Cup were played; on the “Sochi Autodrom” circuit, the Formula 1 Russian Grand Prix was held from 2014 to 2021. On the Imereti Lowland, on the basis of the Olympic facilities, the “Sirius” educational centre grew up, and in 2020 this area was designated as the first federal territory in Russia, bearing the same name.

Today’s Sochi is four districts of very different character: the old sanatorium centre with its 19th-century parks and Stalinist ensembles, forested Khosta with Matsesta, post-Olympic Adler with “Sirius,” and the mountain cluster of Krasnaya Polyana.