Qualla: Phanagoria

Phanagoria: Introduction

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Maria Plotnikova, CC BY 4.0. Phanagoria was born of flight. Around 543 BCE, Greek colonists from the city of Teos in Asia Minor fled their homeland rather than submit to the Persian king Cyrus the Great, and sailed north to the far edge of the Greek world. On a low island in a vanished archipelago between the Black Sea and the marshy Sea of Azov, they founded a new city and named it for one of their own, a man called Phanagoras. It became the largest ancient Greek city on the Taman Peninsula, spread across two plateaus, and the historian Yulia Ustinova has noted that its strange landscape of ravines, hills, and the low cones of active mud volcanoes must have astonished the colonists even more than it astonishes visitors today.

Read more: Phanagoria on Qualla

Image: Maria Plotnikova | CC BY 4.0

Phanagoria: The Eastern Capital

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Maria Plotnikova, CC BY 4.0. 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 w...

Read more: Phanagoria on Qualla

Image: Maria Plotnikova | CC BY 4.0

Phanagoria: Where an Emperor Hid and a King Fell

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MikSed, CC BY 4.0. 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 doo...

Read more: Phanagoria on Qualla

Image: MikSed | CC BY 4.0

Phanagoria: A Synagogue Beneath the Steppe

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Maria Plotnikova, CC BY 4.0. 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. Amo...

Read more: Phanagoria on Qualla

Image: Maria Plotnikova | CC BY 4.0