Bzyb Fortress

The Bzyb fortress stands in the village of Bzyb in Gagra Municipality, on the right bank of the Bzyb. It consists of two parts: in the upper part stood the church, while an old road ran through the court of the lower part. The fortress closed the Bzyb valley and the crossing of the river, for up the valley ran one of the pass routes to the North Caucasus. Its walls are built of well-dressed limestone ashlar and carry rectangular and semicircular towers, buttresses and a gate.

The church of the fortress is a cross-in-square domed building set within the outer rectangle of its walls, with three projecting faceted apses on the east; it is dated to the second half of the ninth century, by some scholars to the tenth. The central apse is five-sided outside with three windows, the side apses three-sided with one window each. Inside, four free-standing piers divided the space into nine bays and carried the drum of the dome on pendentives; dome and drum were octagonal outside. The church has three entrances, from the north, south and west, each with a porch built against it. The walls are faced with dressed stone; the doors and windows are framed by reliefs of twisted rope and concentric circles, and in the arch of the upper window of the south façade a slab with a relief of three crosses survives. In its architecture the church is akin to the church of Tsandripsh. Only the ruins of the walls remain, the dome, vaults, piers and arches having collapsed; east of the church the remains of an older church are visible.

The fortress and church belong to the heyday of the Kingdom of the Abkhazians, the second half of the ninth and the tenth century, and served to control the road up the Bzyb valley; the church, scholars suppose, may also have been the seat of the Byzantine bishop of Soterioupolis. East of the church lie the remains of an earlier church, pointing to a long ecclesiastical history of the site. Levan Rcheulishvili discusses the Bzyb church among the monuments of the domed architecture of Abkhazia of the eighth to tenth centuries.

The fortress decayed over the centuries; of the church only the ruins of its walls remain. On 7 November 2006 a decree of the President of Georgia listed the fortress as an immovable cultural monument of national significance. Because of the occupation Georgia can neither study nor conserve the monument; by the account of Georgian specialists both church and fortress are in poor condition.

The fortress lies south-east of Gagra, about 18 kilometres by road, on the right bank of the Bzyb. The church is a ruin and has no roof. Check access to the site locally.

Abkhazia is an occupied territory. Under Georgian law entry to the region is lawful only through the Enguri crossing; entry from Russia is a breach of Georgian law. Check the current conditions of movement before travelling.