People have wanted this harbor for a very long time. In the days of the Ancient Greeks it was Bata, a colony of the Bosporan Kingdom that grew rich on the grain trade. Later came the Adyghe tribes who settled the land, then the Mongols who conquered it, then the Ottomans, who held the area from 1722 until the Russo-Turkish war of 1829. In 1855, during the Crimean War, English and French fleets sailed in and laid siege to the fort here - and failed to take it. Nearly a century later, in late 1942, German forces occupied the area during the Second World War. Layer upon layer of ambition has washed over this bay, each drawn by the same thing: a sheltered deep-water port on a strategic sea.

The geography does much of the storytelling. Novorossiysk stretches some 25 kilometers along the shore of a bay itself about 15 kilometers long, its streets rising in tiers so that the whole city forms an amphitheater facing the water, the mountains at its back holding off the continental cold - most of the year. The river Tsemes threads through it toward the sea. The climate is humid subtropical, but with a split personality: summers draw warm, tropical air, while winters belong to the north, when the cold takes hold from November to March and three-day windstorms are simply part of life. July averages a pleasant 23.7 degrees Celsius; January hovers near freezing at 2.3. Even August, high summer, can turn violent - the bay is known for sudden storms and even tornadoes.

Novorossiysk wears its history as monuments, and most of them face the sea. The shoreline is lined with memorials to sailors and soldiers: the Monument to the Unknown Sailor, the Monument to the Wives of Sailors, the Monument to Sailors of the Revolution, the Torpedo Boat Memorial, and the sweeping Line of Defense ensemble. Grandest of all is the Malaya Zemlya complex, honoring the marines who held a storm-swept beachhead west of the city in 1943. Statues of Lenin and of Brezhnev stand among them, markers of the Soviet century. Museums fill in the rest - a historical reserve, a planetarium named for Gagarin, even a museum devoted to the cement industry that helped build the modern city. To walk this waterfront is to move through a landscape of remembrance, sailor after sailor, name after name.

For all its martial memory, Novorossiysk knows how to relax by the water it has fought over. In summer the beaches fill with people sunbathing, diving, and yachting, and hydrofoils skim down the coast to Sochi in a matter of hours. Trains have rolled in and out since 1898, when the station - one of the oldest in Russia - was built, and today buses, trolleybuses, and marshrutkas knit the tiered city together. Arrive by air through Anapa, 63 kilometers up the coast, and descend into the great stone bowl of the bay. It is a city of contrasts held in one embrace: heavy industry and holiday beaches, ancient grain port and Soviet memorial, gentle subtropical summer and the roaring winter bora - all of it looking out on the same restless Black Sea.