Dig anywhere in Taman and you strike history. The modern stanitsa sits directly atop the ancient Greek colony of Hermonassa, founded in the sixth century BCE, and above the medieval trading town of Tmutarakan, once a far-flung outpost of Kievan Rus. Layer upon layer of civilization is stacked in the soil here, so much of it that the village supports an archaeological museum built in imitation of a Roman domus. From the end of the fifteenth century until 1783 this was Ottoman ground, guarded by a Turkish fortress; before that annexation it was administered from Kaffa across the strait. A fifteenth-century Turkish condensate pump still survives among the ruins, a small industrial relic from an age of empires that has otherwise dissolved into the earth.

The Taman that exists today was born on August 25, 1792, when Zaporozhian Cossacks under Anton Golovaty landed here to establish the first garrison of the Black Sea Cossack Host. Golovaty made the settlement his residence, and the following year the settlers raised an Orthodox church that still stands as the oldest Russian Orthodox church in the Kuban region. For a while Taman held the official title of town, oddly enough without any government of its own, ruled instead from the neighboring stanitsa of Akhtanizovskaya. In 1849 the arrangement was tidied up and Taman became a proper stanitsa with its own local government. The Estonian sculptor Amandus Adamson later cast a bronze monument to those first Cossack settlers, unveiled in 1911, and it remains the symbol of the village and of Kuban Cossackdom, whose history fills a museum of its own.

The twentieth century brought Taman its hardest years. From September 1942 the village lay under German occupation, and it was not fully freed until the invading forces were driven off the entire Taman Peninsula in October 1943, in some of the bitterest fighting of the war on the Black Sea coast. Peace returned the village to its quieter identity of vineyards and fishermen, and Taman still keeps a small wine-making museum that celebrates the grapes this sunny peninsula has always grown well. In recent decades the coastline has drawn heavy industry, with major port development pushed several kilometers south near the tiny village of Volna, where the Port of Taman handles grain and coal. Yet the old stanitsa itself endures much as travelers have always found it, a modest place living quietly on top of the ruins of empires.