Batumi is the most eccentric and surprising city in Georgia: a Black Sea resort where, within a few blocks, you find skyscrapers in impossible shapes, a casino inside a rotating tower, a steel statue of two lovers who pass through each other every night, palm trees, pebble beaches and an old town of quiet courtyards and wooden balconies. After years of Soviet neglect, it reinvented itself from the 2000s onwards as the country's great tourist showcase, and today it is a vibrant, slightly kitsch mix of Riviera, Las Vegas and Caucasian city that looks like nowhere else in Georgia.
The heart of the city is Batumi Boulevard, a seven-kilometre seafront promenade full of fountains, sculptures, cafés, gardens and bicycles, perfect for a sunset walk with the sea on one side and the lit-up city on the other. Around it unfold its icons: the Alphabetic Tower celebrating the 33 Georgian letters, the moving sculpture of Ali and Nino, Europe Square, the Italian-flavoured Piazza and the Argo cable car, which climbs to a viewpoint with the whole coast at your feet. And on the outskirts, one of the largest and most beautiful botanical gardens in the world, perched above the Black Sea.
But Batumi is also Adjara: a region with its own identity, centuries of history under the Ottoman Empire, spectacular cuisine (this is the birthplace of achma and the famous khachapuri adjaruli, that boat of dough filled with cheese, butter and egg) and green, rainy mountains full of waterfalls, medieval stone bridges and villages with wooden mosques. This guide helps you get around the city, understand what to see and what it costs, make the most of the beach and venture up into Upper Adjara, to discover that behind the glitter of the casinos lies an old, flavourful and fascinating land.
Batumi has very ancient roots: the Greek colony of Batus stood in the area and, very close by, the Roman fortress of Apsaros (Gonio), an imperial outpost on the Caucasus frontier. For centuries Adjara was a borderland between empires: it fell under Ottoman rule in the 17th century, which converted much of its population, the Adjarians, Georgians of Muslim faith, to Islam. In 1878, after the Russo-Turkish War, Batumi passed to the Russian Empire and enjoyed a spectacular boom as an oil port: Baku's oil was shipped out from here, and a young man called Joseph Stalin worked here and organised a famous strike in 1902. It later became a somewhat run-down Soviet resort, until in the 21st century it reinvented itself as the great showpiece city of Georgian tourism. All that history of Greeks, Romans, Ottomans, oil and rebirth is told on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Georgia's subtropical coastline: historic Adjara, under Ottoman rule for centuries, with Batumi turned into a seaside city of skyscrapers and the quiet resorts of the Black Sea.
Read the history of Adjara and the Black Sea coast →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before Batumi had skyscrapers and casinos, this strip of coast was the edge of a legendary world. Ancient Colchis, today's western Georgia, was the far end of the known world for the Greeks. It was a land rich in gold, and Jason and the Argonauts sailed here in search of the Golden Fleece, guarded by King Aeëtes and his daughter, the sorceress Medea. It's no coincidence that a statue of Medea holding up the fleece now presides over Batumi's Europe Square, or that the city's cable car is called Argo, like the ship of that expedition. The city proudly claims its place in one of Europe's founding myths.
There's real history behind the legend. Greek colonies stood on this coast as early as classical times, and one of them, Bathus (from the Greek word 'bathys', deep, after its deep and sheltered bay), gave Batumi its name. But the great ancient remains lie a few kilometres to the south, in Gonio. There, in the 1st century AD, the Romans built the fortress of Apsaros, a stronghold on the empire's eastern frontier that watched over the coast of the Pontus Euxinus (the Black Sea) and the routes into the Caucasus. You can still walk its walls and towers, later strengthened by the Byzantines.
In late antiquity and the Middle Ages, the region belonged to the Georgian kingdoms as they formed and came together. First came Colchis and Caucasian Iberia, then the kingdom of Egrisi-Lazica, and finally medieval Georgia, fully Christian from the 4th century on, which reached its golden age under King David the Builder and Queen Tamar in the 11th to 13th centuries. From that period, mountain Adjara still has graceful single-arch stone bridges, which tradition credits to Tamar's reign.
The fate of Batumi and all of Adjara changed sharply in the 16th century. After united Georgian power fell apart, the Ottoman Empire and Safavid Persia fought over the region, and it finally came under Ottoman control, which was consolidated through the 17th century. For almost three hundred years, Adjara was a frontier province of the sultans' empire. That long period left a deep and distinctive mark: many of its people, the Adjarians, who are Georgian by language and origin, converted to Islam.
This made Adjara unique in Georgia: a region with a Georgian majority but a strong Muslim identity, with carved wooden mosques in its mountain villages and customs shaped by its closeness to Anatolia. Adjara is still the most Muslim part of the country (though Orthodox Christianity and Islam now live side by side there), and you can see the mix in the food, the architecture and the cosmopolitan feel of the coast. Meanwhile, Batumi in those centuries was little more than a port village and an Ottoman fortress on its sheltered bay.
The long Ottoman era also explains why Adjara's history is somewhat different from the rest of Georgia's, and why there were tensions and population movements when it returned to Christian and then Russian hands. Its role as a frontier land between empires, faiths and cultures (Christians and Muslims, Georgians and Turks, East and West) is key to understanding Batumi's mixed soul. The Ali and Nino sculpture captures it perfectly: a Muslim man and a Christian woman who love each other but can never fully come together.
The big change came in 1878. After the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878 and the Treaty of Berlin, Adjara and Batumi passed from the Ottoman Empire to the Russian Empire. The Russians quickly made Batumi a free port and the Black Sea outlet for one of the great riches of the age: oil from the Caspian. In 1883 the railway linking Baku (in today's Azerbaijan) with Batumi was completed, followed soon after by a pipeline. From this port, Baku's oil was loaded onto ships bound for Europe and the rest of the world.
The result was a spectacular boom. Batumi filled up with refineries, storage depots, banks and companies (the Rothschilds and the Nobels invested here), and with a varied population of Georgians, Russians, Armenians, Greeks, Turks and Europeans. Within a few decades it went from backwater village to prosperous, cosmopolitan city, with theatres, hotels, a seafront boulevard (opened in 1881) and elegant European-style buildings that still give the historic centre its character. It was Batumi's first urban 'golden age'.
That industrial world also had a working-class, turbulent side. Among Batumi's refineries, a young Georgian revolutionary named Ioseb Jughashvili worked and organised. History would know him as Stalin. In 1902 he organised a major strike and a workers' demonstration in the city that ended with troops opening fire. The episode left its mark on him, and Soviet propaganda would later remember it. That Batumi of oil, money and social unrest was the testing ground for the modern city.
The 20th century was turbulent for Batumi. After the Russian Empire collapsed in 1917, the city and Adjara went through years of chaos. They were briefly occupied by Ottoman troops and then by British ones, and they sat at the centre of the dispute over how to divide up the Caucasus after the First World War. In 1921 the Red Army took Georgia and brought it into the Soviet Union. To respect Adjara's particular character (Georgian, but with a Muslim majority), the Adjarian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic was created in 1921 with Batumi as its capital. The region keeps that autonomous status, in a changed form, to this day.
In Soviet times, Batumi was both an industrial oil port and a holiday resort for workers from all over the USSR, who came to soak up the sun on the Black Sea. Sanatoriums were built, the boulevard was kept up, and the famous Botanical Garden (founded in 1880 and developed in the 20th century) became a source of scientific pride. Beyond summer tourism, though, the city gradually lost its shine. Its infrastructure aged, and after the USSR fell in 1991, Georgia sank into a deep crisis.
In the 1990s, Adjara came under the almost feudal control of a local leader, Aslan Abashidze. He ruled the region in an authoritarian way, semi-independent from the central government, and kept the port and border revenues for himself. Batumi was a city in decline at the time, with crumbling buildings and an informal economy. That period ended in 2004 when, after the Rose Revolution in Tbilisi, the new Georgian government forced Abashidze out and brought Adjara back under state control. This opened the door to the great transformation that followed.
The Batumi that dazzles visitors today was born almost entirely in the last twenty years. After regaining control of Adjara in 2004, the Georgian government bet heavily on turning Batumi into the country's great tourist showcase and an investment hub. From 2007-2010 a spectacular wave of construction got under way. It brought glass towers in daring shapes, international chain hotels, casinos (taking advantage of the gambling ban in neighbouring Turkey), a renovated boulevard and a collection of eye-catching monuments and buildings, some designed by international architects.
That building fever produced today's icons. They include the Alphabetic Tower (2011), which celebrates the Georgian script, the moving Ali and Nino sculpture (2010), Europe Square with its statue of Medea, the Italian-style Piazza, the Argo cable car and the Dancing Fountains. There's also a futuristic skyline that earned the city nicknames like 'the Dubai of the Black Sea' and 'the Georgian Las Vegas'. The contrast between those skyscrapers and the old town, with its wooden balconies and buildings from the oil boom, is one of the defining features of today's Batumi.
Tourism took off. Every summer the city welcomes crowds from Georgia, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Russia, Israel, Ukraine and all over Europe, drawn by the beach, the casinos, the nightlife and the affordable prices. Growth this fast also brings debate about chaotic urban planning, speculation, and the tension between the tourist glitz and the traditional, Muslim Adjara of the interior. Still, there's no denying that Batumi has been reborn. From Greek colony to Roman fortress, from Ottoman province to oil port, from Soviet resort to showpiece city, Batumi has been reinventing itself on the same deep Black Sea bay for two thousand years. For travellers, that mix of myth, history and modern kitsch is exactly what makes it irresistible.
