Vosporo

Vosporo stands on the Kerch Strait, where the Black Sea narrows into the passage to the Sea of Azov. Miletian Greeks founded Panticapaeum here in the 7th century BC, and it became the capital of the Bosporan kingdom; the acropolis crowned the hill later called Mount Mithridat. The medieval town was Byzantine, then Khazar, then part of the Russian principality of Tmutarakan, before the Mongols took Crimea in 1239.

In 1318 the town passed to the Genoese, who knew it as Vospro or Cerchio and ruled it from Kaffa as part of their Black Sea colonies. Genoese records show Circassian princes governing it under them. Townspeople worked the salt pans and fishing grounds along the strait. When the Ottomans took the Genoese colonies in 1475, the town fell into decay, served as a slave market and suffered repeated raids by Zaporozhian Cossacks. In 1701 the Ottomans began the fortress of Yeni-Kale on the strait to watch the passage. Russian troops entered in 1771, and by the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca in 1774 the town and Yeni-Kale were ceded to Russia, nine years before the rest of Crimea.