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The Museum of Chersonesos

The Museum of Chersonesos is the story-telling heart of an ancient Greek city on the Black Sea, a few kilometres west of Sevastopol's centre. Founded in the 5th century BC by Dorian colonists, the polis of Tauric Chersonese grew into a long-lived mercantile outpost linking the Greek, Roman and Byzantine worlds to the lands north of the Black Sea. The museum's collections and the open-air ruins beside them let you meet that 1,700-year history in one place: marble inscriptions, glass, ceramics, sculpture and the excavated streets, houses and churches of the city itself. Established in 1892 and now part of a national archaeological preserve, the museum keeps its treasures where they were found, so a visit is as much a walk through a real excavation as a look at display cases. The site is recognised as a UNESCO World Heritage property for the remarkably preserved city grid and the surrounding farmland once divided into hundreds of equal vineyard plots.