Before the whole area has conquered by Cimmerian, Scythian and Sarmatian invaders. The Zygii people lived in the area under the Kingdom of Pontus' then the Roman Empire's influence in antiquity. From the 6th to the 11th centuries, the area successively belonged to the Georgian kingdom of Lazica and Georgian kingdom of Abkhazia who built a dozen churches within the city boundaries. From the 11th to the middle of the 19th century it was a part of the Georgian Kingdom. The Christian settlements along the coast were destroyed by the invading Gokturks, Khazars, Mongol Empire and other nomadic empires whose control of the region was slight. The northern wall of an 11th-century Byzantinesque basilica still stands in the Loo Microdistrict.
In the 14th�19th centuries, the region was dominated by the Abkhaz, Ubykh and Adyghe tribes, the current location of the city of Sochi known as Ubykhia was part of historical Circassia, and was controlled by the native people of the local mountaineer clans of the north-west Caucasus, nominally under the sovereignty of the Ottoman Empire, which was their principal trading partner in the Muslim world. The coastline was ceded to Russia in 1829 as a result of a Caucasian War and Russo-Turkish War, 1828�1829; however, the Circassians did not admit the Russian control over Circassia and kept resisting the newly established Russian outposts along the Circassians coast;Provision of weapons and ammunition from abroad to the Circassians caused a diplomatic conflict between the Russian Empire and the United Kingdom that occurred in 1836 over the mission of the Vixen.
The Russians had no detailed knowledge of the area until Baron Feodor Tornau investigated the coastal route from Gelendzhik to Gagra, and across the mountains to Kabarda, in the 1830s.[citation needed] In 1838, the fort of Alexandria, renamed Navaginsky a year later, was founded at the mouth of the Sochi River as part of the Black Sea coastal line, a chain
