Old postcards Black Sea coast

The earliest part of this section is a large 1955 set that follows the Black Sea coast of the Caucasus from Sochi to Batumi. The Sochi cards show the railway station, the Primorskaya hotel, the beach, a path down to the sea, the Ordzhonikidze sanatorium and the funicular of the Voroshilov sanatorium (sanatoriums were Soviet health resorts with medical treatment), plus Khosta, the bath building at Matsesta and the road to Krasnaya Polyana. The Matsesta spa was founded in 1902 on hydrogen sulphide springs.

Further south come Gagra with its colonnade and the Gagripsh hotel, the sea and shore at Pitsunda, the beach at Gudauta, Akhali-Afoni with a pavilion and a waterfall, Sukhumi with Lenin Street and the park on Sukhumi Hill, and Lake Ritsa, a mountain lake of glacial and tectonic origin.

The 1955 set ends at Kobuleti and Batumi: a fountain in the seaside park, the diesel-electric ship “Rossiya” in port, and the Botanical Garden founded in 1912 by the botanist and geographer Andrei Krasnov. Later cards from 1961 to 1989 return to Sochi, Gagra, Sukhumi, Batumi and Pitsunda, among them the Amra holiday hotel at Pitsunda, dated 1989.

Among these vintage postcards of the Caucasus coast, the single-year 1955 run is handy for dating other photographs of the same resorts.