Batumi's past is layered rather than monumental. A Roman fort at Gonio, a Byzantine siege cliff up the coast, an 1866 Ottoman mosque, Nobel kerosene wealth and Stalinist facades all sit within an hour of each other.
Roman legions laid out this 4.75-hectare rectangular fort with 18 towers in the 1st century AD; Byzantines, Ottomans and Georgians rebuilt the walls in turn. Tradition places the Apostle Matthias' grave inside the enclosure. Open 10:00–18:00.
Chavchavadze St 77 holds Colchian gold, Bronze Age axes and Greek amphorae excavated at Pichvnari, the 5th-century BC Greek-Colchian port north of the city. Compact, well-labelled halls; open 10:00–18:00, closed Monday.
Justinian I fortified this cliff-top rock in 535 AD to control the Lazica trade road, and the Byzantine-Sasanian siege of 550–551 was fought at its gate. Basilica foundations, cisterns and a tower survive above the sea.
Batumi's oldest working church, consecrated in 1865 while the city was still Ottoman and funded by Greek and Georgian merchants. Its iconostasis survived the Soviet years, when the building was used as a warehouse and archive.
Ludvig and Robert Nobel piped Baku kerosene here in 1883, turning Batumi into the Russian Empire's oil export port. The museum keeps tanker models, brass valves and photographs of the 1902 refinery strike that Stalin helped organise.
Raised by the Ottomans in 1863 and kept burning through Russian, British and Soviet rule, the cast-iron tower still marks the harbour entrance. British forces occupied Batumi from 1918 to 1920 and coaled their ships below it.
The collection traces Adjara from Colchian bronzes through three centuries of Ottoman rule to the 1878 Treaty of Berlin that handed Batumi to Russia. The ethnographic hall reconstructs highland Adjaran houses, looms and costume.
The 1952 Stalinist-neoclassical theatre and its Neptune fountain, copied from Bologna's 1566 bronze, anchor the Soviet civic core of the city. Lenin's statue stood on the square in front of it until it was removed in 1990.
Batumi's only surviving mosque, built in 1866 by the Aslanishvili family, with a wooden interior painted in floral medallions and Ottoman calligraphy. Three other mosques in the city were demolished under Soviet rule.
Simon Volkovich designed it in 1904 after the synagogues of The Hague and Amsterdam, for a community of Georgian and Ashkenazi traders. Closed by the Soviets in 1923 and used as a gymnasium, it was returned in 1993 and restored in 1998.
Russian botanist Andrey Krasnov founded the garden in 1912, laying out nine geographic zones across 108 hectares of terraced cliff. His grave overlooks the Himalayan section, and the 1880s Mtsvane Kontskhi railway halt sits below.
Armenian oil and tobacco traders paid for this hilltop church in 1885; the marine painter Ivan Aivazovsky donated three canvases to it, later moved for safekeeping. Soviet authorities ran it as a planetarium for decades.