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HistoryFrom the 6th to the 15th centuries the area successively belonged to the Christian kingdoms of Egrisi and Abkhazia who built a dozen churches within the city limits. The Christian settlements along the coast were destroyed by the invading Gokturks, Khazars, and other nomadic empires whose control of the region was slight. The northern wall of an 11th-century Byzantinesque basilica still stands in the district of Loo.From the 15th century the coast was controlled by the local mountaineer clans, nominally under the sovereignty of the Ottoman Empire. It was ceded to Russia in 1829 as a result of the Russo-Turkish War. In 1838, a fort of Alexandria, renamed Navaginsky a year later, was founded at the mouth of the Sochi river to protect the area from Circassian incursions. During the Crimean War the garrison was evacuated from Navaginsky in order to reinforce active forces. The fort was rebuilt in 1864 under the name of Dakhovsky, or Dakhovsky Posad (as it became known in 1874). In 1896, the settlement acquired its present name, derived from the local Sochi River. Town status was granted to Sochi in 1917. From 1918 to 1919 the town and its environs saw sporadic armed clashes involving the Red Army, White movement forces and the Democratic Republic of Georgia. Sochi was established as a fashionable resort area in the years of the Soviet Union when Joseph Stalin had his favourite dacha built in the city; Stalin's study, complete with a wax statue of the leader, is now open to the public. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sochi. |
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