The Port Where Empires Met and Mixed: A Batumi Walking Tour

Batumi has been shaped by six different states over roughly 150 years, leaving behind a city where mosques, synagogues, Catholic churches, and Orthodox cathedrals stand within a few streets of each other. On this walking tour, you'll trace how Ottoman sultans, Russian tsars, oil barons, and Soviet planners each left their mark on this Black Sea port. You'll also hear how ordinary residents - a tobacco merchant, a Greek doctor, a street dog - became part of the city's story.

The tour starts at the Batumi Synagogue, built after a Jewish community petitioned Tsar Nicholas II for permission, promising prayers for a male heir. From there, you'll walk along one of the city's oldest streets toward the former railway station, now repurposed as a bank, and continue past a former tropical diseases clinic transformed into the Parliament of Adjara. Along the way, you'll learn why this small coastal region holds the rare status of an autonomous republic - a compromise brokered between Kemalist Turkey and Soviet Russia in 1921.

Deeper into the Old Town, you'll pass through the Turkish quarter, where the Orta Jame Mosque survived Soviet closure and a stint as a military warehouse, and reach the waterfront where Aristotle described a deep harbour in the 300s BC. The route continues through streets once home to Greek and Armenian merchant communities, past the House of Rothschild – where 22% of global oil exports were once coordinated, and where Soviet power was later proclaimed - before ending at 6 May Park, whose lake was a sea lagoon just a few centuries ago.

On this two-hour tour, you'll have a chance to:

• Explore the Orta Jame Mosque, the only surviving mosque in Batumi's historic centre
• Visit the Cathedral of the Holy Mother of God, built as a Catholic church and now an Orthodox cathedral
• Hear how the Nobel and Rothschild families turned Batumi into one of the world's busiest oil ports
• See Europe Square and its statue of Medea, linking the city to the ancient myth of Jason and the Argonauts
• Discover the Armenian Church of Surb Prkich, once a Soviet planetarium, and the magnolia planted beside it by painter Ivan Aivazovsky
• Admire the House of Merchant Sabaev, decorated with Atlantes sculptures and rumoured to hide jewels inside them

Batumi rewards the curious, and this tour gives you the history to read the city's streets for yourself.