Batumi Archaeological Museum

This is a small museum that answers one question: who lived here before Gonio and Petra were built. The collection comes from excavations across Adjara — Pichvnari, Gonio-Apsaros, Tsikhisdziri — and covers something over two and a half thousand years. The most important material is from Pichvnari, a Greek and Colchian burial ground near Kobuleti. In the 5th and 4th centuries BC Greek traders and local Colchians lived side by side there and were buried in the same necropolis, each by their own rite, in the same ground. That is what the cases show: Attic black-glaze vessels next to Colchian pottery, Greek amphorae that carried wine and oil, local bronze bracelets. Elsewhere in the hall: - Colchian goldwork — fine, precise earrings and beads, some of it granulated - The Roman layer from Gonio-Apsaros: coins, military fittings, roof tiles stamped by the legion - Medieval ceramics and Christian crosses from Tsikhisdziri There is one room and it is not large; labels are in Georgian and English, occasionally terse. That is precisely why it works best before Gonio or Petra rather than after. Stone walls become far easier to read once you have seen what was dug out from inside them — the coin that dates a layer, the tile that names a garrison. An hour is plenty. If it is raining in Batumi, which it does generously between October and March, this is one of the better places in the city to spend that hour.

Gallery