Visiting Sochi

Sochi was one of my favorite places I visited in Russia and also one of the biggest surprises of the trip. I had just come down from climbing Mount Elbrus, where I had been surrounded by snow, glaciers, and freezing temperatures, and suddenly I was on the Black Sea in a warm, humid, subtropical environment. It was a completely different side of Russia from anything I had experienced before.

I spent several days in Sochi and absolutely loved it. There was much more to the city than the photographs I happened to take, but for whatever reason, nearly all of my surviving photos are from the outdoor activities I did outside the city center. I explored rivers and forests, went swimming, and even went scuba diving in the Black Sea. Unfortunately, I don’t have photographs from the dive or much of the city itself, which gives this page a much more wilderness-focused view of Sochi than my actual experience there.

It’s somewhere I would genuinely like to return to. Between the Black Sea, the subtropical forests, the nearby Caucasus Mountains, and the city itself, there is considerably more of Sochi that I’d like to explore and photograph.

One of my excursions took me away from the developed areas around Sochi and into the forested landscape surrounding the city. Numerous rivers descend from the western Caucasus toward the Black Sea, creating valleys and swimming areas within easy reach of Sochi.

The forests were particularly memorable. Before this trip, the landscape wasn’t something I associated with Russia at all. The combination of dense vegetation, moss-covered trees, rivers, mountains, and warm summer weather made the area around Sochi feel completely different from Moscow and the high Caucasus.

The rivers were also popular places to swim and spend the day. After the cold conditions on Elbrus, being able to swim outside in the summer heat was a dramatic change. Some of the swimming areas were surrounded by steep rock walls and thick forest, making the river excursions one of my favorite outdoor experiences around Sochi.

At one of the river areas, people were covering themselves in mud along the banks. I never determined whether there was supposed to be some therapeutic benefit or whether it was simply part of spending the day at the river, but plenty of people joined in. It was another memorable part of an already unusual day outside the city.

Sochi’s warm climate supports vegetation that can seem unexpected for Russia. The city lies along the Black Sea at the foot of the western Caucasus, where the surrounding landscape is exceptionally green. Flowers and dense vegetation were everywhere during my summer visit, reinforcing how different this part of the country felt from the Russia I had imagined before arriving.

I also visited several smaller Russian Orthodox churches around Sochi. I liked the colorful architecture and the more intimate atmosphere of these churches, especially after seeing some of the monumental buildings in Moscow. The interiors were richly decorated, and the churches were active places of worship rather than simply historic attractions.

My photographs from Sochi ended up capturing only one part of my time there. I spent days in the area and experienced the city, the Black Sea, and activities such as scuba diving that aren’t represented in these pictures at all. What the photographs do capture well is the landscape that surprised me most: a lush, warm part of Russia where rivers run through subtropical forests between the Caucasus Mountains and the Black Sea. I loved my time in Sochi, and it’s one of the places in Russia I would most like to return to and explore more thoroughly.