Places in Georgia

The Byzantine fortified town of Petra on rocky seaside hills in the village of Tsikhisdziri, 8 kilometres south of Kobuleti: Petra Pia Justiniana, founded in 535 under Justinian I and a battleground of the Lazic War (541–562), taken by Khosrow I in 541 and besieged from 551 by Bessas, who recaptured and razed it. The citadel, a sixth-century three-nave basilica with a mosaic floor, a bath and more than 300 burials survive.

The best-studied town site of the Colchian hinterland on Akhvlediani Hill: a temple city of the eighth to first centuries BC, perhaps Pliny's Surium or Strabo's temple of Leucothea, with the diadems of Colchian goldwork and bronze statuary, burnt in the mid-first century BC; excavated since 1947 under Khoshtaria and Lordkipanidze, a museum-reserve since 1985, renewed in 2020 and on the UNESCO tentative list since 2007.

Tsikhegoji, capital of the Kingdom of Egrisi (Lazica), the Archaeopolis of the Byzantines, in a loop of the Tekhuri: three walls, a citadel, royal palaces, baths and a basilica, excavated systematically since 1973 and studied by the Anglo-Georgian expedition since 2001, with a museum on the site.

The "Tzibile" of Procopius of Caesarea: the chief fortress of late antique and early medieval Apsilia on two cliffs rising 400 metres above the Kodori gorge, with towers, churches, a palace and cemeteries whose excavation revealed the "Tsebelda culture".

A Milesian colony of the sixth century BC on the coast of Colchis, on the site of present-day Sukhumi: Strabo's market of seventy peoples, the refuge of Mithridates and the forerunner of Roman Sebastopolis, most of whose ruins lie on the floor of Sukhumi bay and from whose waters a marble stela was raised in 1953.