Batumi's culture runs deeper than its skyline: a Georgian modernist collection in a Soviet-built gallery, a working opera house, an 1866 mosque with painted wooden panels, and Roman walls 15km south. Three days of art, stage and Adjaran craft.
Around 1,500 works, including Georgian modernists Lado Gudiashvili and David Kakabadze alongside Soviet-era Adjaran painters and graphic art. Three floors on Zurab Gorgiladze Street, open 10:00–18:00, closed Mondays.
Built in 2009 to a design by Vazha Orbeladze, this Venetian-style square wraps its arcades in mosaics and stained glass by Georgian artists. The clock tower chimes on the hour and buskers play under the colonnade from midday.
Set in the Nobel oil company's former villa, the museum traces how Batumi became the terminus of the world's first long-distance oil pipeline in 1907. Period interiors, Ludvig Nobel's technical drawings and a small screening room.
Raised in 1898–1902 by the Zubalashvili brothers as a Catholic church in neo-Gothic brick, it passed to the Georgian Orthodox Church in 1989. The interior keeps its Gothic ribbed vaults beneath later Byzantine-style frescoes.
Adjara from Colchian bronze through Ottoman rule to the Soviet resort decades: gold jewellery, carved wooden house fronts, folk costume and photography. Roughly 160,000 catalogued items, a small fraction on display at any time.
A compact collection of Colchian and Greco-Roman finds from the Adjaran coast: bronze axes, amphorae lifted at Gonio and Pichvnari, glassware and Roman coins struck at Apsaros. Labels run in Georgian and English throughout.
Home to the Batumi Opera and Ballet Company and the Adjara State Symphony Orchestra, running a September–June season of opera, ballet and chamber recitals. Matinees and open rehearsals are common on weekend afternoons.
Georgian-language repertory from Shakespeare to contemporary Adjaran playwrights, staged in a 1950s neoclassical house on Theatre Square. Outside stands a copy of Giambologna's 1566 Neptune fountain from Bologna.
The city's working bazaar runs on Adjaran produce: barrels of tkemali plum sauce, sulguni and fresh nadughi cheese, churchkhela sold by the string, and mountain honey brought down from Keda. Traders open around 07:00.
Batumi's only surviving mosque, built in 1866 by the Aslanidze family, keeps a painted wooden interior of floral panels and Ottoman calligraphy beneath a green upper gallery. It remains the working centre of Muslim Adjara.
Fifteen kilometres south, the Roman fort of Apsaros keeps 18 towers and some 900 metres of wall from the 1st–2nd century AD, with a site museum of excavated glass, coins and pottery. Local tradition places the apostle Matthias' grave inside.
Completed in 1904 to Gershon Kopelevich's design, modelled on the synagogues of The Hague and Amsterdam, and reopened in 1998 after Soviet closure. The streets around it keep their brick-and-balcony merchant houses.