Phanagoria grew into a great emporium, a clearinghouse for all the traffic moving between the steppe marshes and the lands south of the Caucasus. As the Bosporan Kingdom rose to dominate the strait, the city became its eastern capital, the counterpart to Panticapaeum across the water, and Strabo praised it as a place renowned for trade. Its wealth is written in its graveyards. A vast necropolis wraps around the old city on three sides, holding thousands of burials, many in cypress or marble sarcophagi, and one royal mound descends by a stone stairway into a painted burial chamber where four horses were entombed with harnesses of gold. The site was first identified in the eighteenth century when marble bases dedicated to Aphrodite surfaced, hinting at the great sanctuary of the goddess that Strabo called the largest in the whole Pontic region.

History's tides washed remarkable figures onto these shores. During the Mithridatic Wars, Phanagoria threw in its lot with Rome and withstood a siege by the army of Pharnaces II, and it was here that the great revolt against Mithridates VI of Pontus first erupted, forcing the doomed king's own sons to surrender the citadel. Centuries later, in 704 CE, the deposed Byzantine emperor Justinian II took refuge in the city, then under a Khazar governor, and married Theodora, the sister of the Khazar khagan, before clawing his way back to the throne in Constantinople. The archaeology keeps pace with the drama: in 2009 excavators uncovered what they identified as the palace of Mithridates himself, the physical seat of one of Rome's most formidable enemies rising out of the Taman soil.

The deepest surprise came recently. In 2023, archaeologists announced the discovery at Phanagoria of what may be one of the oldest synagogues ever found anywhere outside Israel, built around the beginning of the first century BCE and standing for more than five hundred years. Among the remains lay menorahs, altars, and fragments of marble stele, and further digging revealed an entire Jewish quarter woven into the city, threaded by major streets and ringed by homes, a vineyard, a garden, and a water network. It was no isolated outpost but a rooted community, one thread in the astonishing weave of peoples, Greeks, Sarmatians, Anatolians, and Jews, who shared this crossroads. Around a third of ancient Phanagoria now lies drowned beneath the sea, so divers and archaeologists press on together, still lifting the layered past from land and water alike.