Foros began, like so much of this coast, with the Greeks. Medieval Greek merchants founded the settlement and gave it its name, and for centuries it remained a modest point on the sea road along Crimea's southern shore, one more small harbor among many. Its rediscovery came late, in the closing years of the nineteenth century, and it came through commerce rather than conquest. Alexander Kuznetsov, a Russian tea merchant so successful he was known as a "tea king," built himself a palace on the shore at Foros and, in an act of grand piety, commissioned the town's defining landmark: the Resurrection Church, an ornate five-domed extravaganza perched on a 400-meter cliff overlooking the settlement. That soaring little church, visible from far along the coast and seemingly balanced on the edge of the sky, remains the first thing most travelers know about the place, the emblem stamped on every postcard of Foros. A wealthy man's church and a wealthy man's villa together lifted an obscure fishing settlement into a fashionable resort, and the town has traded on that reputation ever since.

Geography gives Foros its quiet distinction. This is the southernmost resort not only in Crimea but in all of Ukraine, a warm pocket of coast sheltered by the mountains that rise steeply behind it. The Baidarsky Pass carries the road down toward the sea, and the town spreads along a shoreline where the swimming season is long and the light is generous. For generations it drew holidaymakers seeking sun and calm, and later it drew something else: the powerful. The Soviet leadership had several state dachas built in the vicinity, prizing exactly the seclusion and mild climate that had first made Foros a resort. It was a place to disappear from the pressures of Moscow, screened by mountains, cradled by the Black Sea, far from the centers of power. That very seclusion would give the town its place in history.

In August 1991, Gorbachev was vacationing at his luxury dacha near Foros when hardline officials in Moscow launched a coup against him. His communications were severed and he was held under house arrest at the seaside residence while the plotters, seeking to halt his reforms, announced to the country that he was ill and unable to govern. During the seizure, his dacha was fired upon more than once. It was a surreal captivity: one of the most powerful men on earth, cut off in a sunlit villa by the sea, listening for news of whether his rule, and his life, would survive the week. The coup collapsed within days, undone by resistance in Moscow, and Gorbachev returned to a country already slipping beyond his control; within months the Soviet Union itself would cease to exist. The drama played out against the same gentle backdrop that had always defined Foros, the same sea, the same mountains, the same warm air. For a handful of days, the southernmost resort in the country became the still point around which an empire turned. Then the crowds and the calm returned, and Foros went back to being what it had always been, a quiet town that had briefly held the world's attention and quietly let it go.