Poti

Poti is a working town, not a resort, and it is worth knowing that before you go. There are cranes, container stacks, railway sidings and a grey, windy shore. What it also has is a history and a street plan you will find nowhere else in Georgia.

The Greek city of Phasis stood somewhere very close by: a Milesian colony of the sixth century BC, the port from which the Argonaut story begins. The city is long gone, probably swallowed by sea and lagoon, and its exact site is still argued over. Modern Poti is far younger. The Russian empire founded it as a port on the edge of the marsh in 1858.

The town took its present shape under Niko Nikoladze, mayor for almost twenty years from 1894. He drained the swamp, enlarged the harbour, brought in electric light and a tramway, and laid the streets around a circular central square from which the avenues radiate like spokes. The plan is still legible on the ground.

In the middle of that square stands the Cathedral of the Nativity of the Virgin, built in 1906–07 at Nikoladze's instigation. Its model is Hagia Sophia in Constantinople: a low, wide dome carried on half-domes. It was built in reinforced concrete, a bold choice for the time. Under Soviet rule it was a theatre, returned to the church only in 2005.

The second real sight is at the river mouth: a cast-iron lighthouse made in England in 1862, shipped out in sections and bolted together here, and still in service.

The port has been the point of the place for a century and a half. It handles more cargo than any other Georgian harbour and has a free industrial zone attached to it. It has also been a target: in August 2008 Russian forces entered the town and sank several Georgian naval vessels at their moorings. The wrecks were cleared, but those weeks are remembered here.

The whole town sits at sea level, threaded with drainage canals that still have to be pumped; when a sea storm meets high water on the Rioni, the streets flood.

An hour or two covers everything — the square, the cathedral, the lighthouse, a view of the port and a market selling whatever the boats brought in. Winter here is wet and fiercely windy, summer heavy and humid. But the sun going down over the Rioni mouth gives the town a better face in the evening than it has at midday.