Dioscurias

Dioscurias (Greek Διοσκουριάς) is an ancient city on the Black Sea coast of Colchis, on the site of present-day Sukhumi; its remains are supposed to lie in the centre of the city and, for the most part, on the floor of Sukhumi bay between the mouths of the Adzapsh and the Besleti (Basla). In the middle of the sixth century BC Greeks from Miletus founded the colony on the site of a local Colchian settlement of the second and early first millennia BC; the Greek pottery found at Eshera is a century older than the material from Sukhumi bay, so the centre of the earliest Greek settlement may have been there. The city was named after the Dioscuri, the twins Castor and Pollux, sons of Leda; Pomponius Mela held it to have been founded by the Dioscuri themselves, Strabo and Pliny by their charioteers, the Spartans Amphitus and Cercius.

The city was a hub of trade between Greece and the local tribes, importing salt and Greek wares and exporting timber, flax and hemp; it was also the chief centre of the slave trade in Colchis. Strabo describes Dioscurias as the beginning of the isthmus between the Caspian and the Pontus and the common market of seventy peoples; Pliny, citing Timosthenes, speaks of three hundred tongues and of 130 interpreters through whom the Romans did business. In the second century BC the city passed into the realm of Mithridates VI of Pontus, kept its municipal constitution and around 100 BC struck bronze coins with the caps of the Dioscuri, stars and the thyrsus of Dionysus, inscribed ΔΙΟΣΚΟΥΡΙΑΔΟΣ; in 65–64 BC Mithridates, pursued by the Romans, took refuge here. On land the lowest levels reached by archaeologists are of the first and second centuries AD, while the remains of the towers and walls of Sebastopolis have been found under water. The amphorae, coins, gravestones and weapons found in the bay are in the Sukhumi State Museum; 12 coins struck in Dioscurias are kept in the Simon Janashia Museum in Tbilisi.

At the beginning of our era a catastrophe befell the city, which is linked with the severe earthquakes on the Black Sea coast at that time. Under Emperor Augustus the city took the name Sebastopolis; in the first century Pliny describes it as virtually deserted, yet in the 130s, in Arrian's time, a Roman garrison stood here. According to Gregory of Nyssa there were Christians in the city at the end of the fourth century. In 542, at the start of the Lazic War, the Romans evacuated the town and demolished its citadel so that it should not fall to the Persians; in 565 Justinian I restored the wall and adorned Sebastopolis with streets and buildings. According to Juansher the city was sacked by Marwan the Deaf in 736; thereafter it lived on as Tskhumi.

The study of Dioscurias begins in 1712, when the French traveller Aubry de La Motraye saw several columns and the mutilated head of a statue here and bought from local people a coin struck in Dioscurias; in 1833 Frédéric Dubois de Montpéreux described the history of the coast from the ancient sources. In 1870 V. I. Chernyavsky first proposed that Dioscurias lay on the site of Sukhumi and, with Romul Prendel, traced the remains of structures on the floor of the bay; in 1886 the Moscow Archaeological Society under Vladimir Sizov revealed cultural layers of the fifth to third centuries BC on the shore of the bay and found no trace of Dioscurias at Skurcha, confirming the Sukhumi theory; in 1892 Chernyavsky found a fragment of a slab with an inscription attesting the presence in the city of the Roman legate Flavius Arrianus. In 1953 a marble gravestone was found under water at the mouth of the Besleti, a woman with two children on a slab of 157 by 92 centimetres of a grey-spotted marble not found locally; studied by Mikhail Trapsh and Otar Lordkipanidze, it was dated to 430–420 BC. The city remains almost unexplored: excavation on land began only in the 1980s and was cut short by the war of 1992–1993.

Almost nothing of Dioscurias can be seen: the city lies on the sea floor, and on land its site is occupied by the centre of Sukhumi, where the lowest levels reached by archaeologists belong to the first and second centuries AD. The ancient period is best met in the Sukhumi State Museum, where the stela of 1953, amphorae and coins are displayed; coins of Dioscurias are also kept in the Simon Janashia Museum in Tbilisi.

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