The building of fortifications began with a landing of sea-borne troops. Fort of the Holy Spirit was built (1837) in the moth of the Mzymta, then Fort Alexandria (1838) in the mouth of the River Sochi, and in 1839 - Golovinsky and Lazarev Forts on the Rivers Psezuapse and Shakhe.
In that time many famous people could be seen on the coast of Sochi. The landing in the mouth of the Shakhe was led by Nikolay Nikolayevich Rayevsky, the son of the celebrated hero of the Patriotic War in 1812, the maternal great-grandson of Lomonosov, a friend of Pushkin. The Black Sea Fleet was commanded by Mikhail Petrovich Lazarev, who was a member of the expedition that discovered the Antarctic Continent and a participant of three voyages round the world (one of seas washing the sixth continent was given his name). The flag battleship "Silistria" was led by Pavel Stepanovich Nakhimov - future admiral, a hero of the Crimean War. The sea expeditions were constantly accompanied by the artist Aivazovsky. Participants of the landings were Lev Pushkin, the great poet's young brother; Konstantin Danzas, the second of A.S.Pushkin; exiled free-thinking Decembrists: Alexander Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, a writer, Alexander Odoevsky, reduced to a sergeant, and others. Soldiers of the rebellious Life Guard regiments involved in the mutiny of December 14, 1825 on Senate Square also took part in the landings in Sochi. Many of this own "democratic" society sympathized and condoled with the highlanders. General Rayevsky, by his own words, "rose against the fatal military operations in the Caucasus" resembling "all the miseries of the primary conquest of America" and had to send in his papers.
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