AT A GLANCE
Why go?
The Museum of Chersonesos is the story-telling heart of an ancient Greek city on the Black Sea, a few kilometres west of Sevastopol's centre. Founded in the 5th century BC by Dorian colonists, the polis of Tauric Chersonese grew into a long-lived mercantile outpost linking the Greek, Roman and Byzantine worlds to the lands north of the Black Sea. The museum's collections and the open-air ruins beside them let you meet that 1,700-year history in one place: marble inscriptions, glass, ceramics, sculpture and the excavated streets, houses and churches of the city itself.↗↗
Established in 1892 and now part of a national archaeological preserve, the museum keeps its treasures where they were found, so a visit is as much a walk through a real excavation as a look at display cases. The site is recognised as a UNESCO World Heritage property for the remarkably preserved city grid and the surrounding farmland once divided into hundreds of equal vineyard plots.↗↗
Two thousand years in one site
What makes Chersonesos unusual is its continuity. Founded around the last quarter of the 5th century BC as a colony tied to Heracleia Pontica, the city stood on the Heraclean Peninsula for centuries, was rebuilt and defended through Roman and Byzantine times, and remained a hub of Black Sea trade right up to the late medieval period. Only a fraction of its roughly forty hectares has been excavated, yet that digging has revealed enough walls, streets and foundations to read the life of a Greek polis almost from the ground up.
