Batumi Botanical Garden & Petra Fortress

The Botanical Garden of Batumi looks like the real Garden of Edem from the Bible pages. There is no other way to name this amazing paradise area where samples of the most rare, strange and beautiful plants of the world are collected! The huge territory of the garden (more then 110 hectares) hosts the collection of more then two thousand tree species.
The Garden contains flora from nine phyto-geographic areas: East Asia, North America, New Zealand, South America, the Himalayas, Mexico, Australia, the Mediterranean, and the Caucasian humid subtropics. Garden was established in 1912 by the prominent botanist and geographer Andrey Krasnov. The garden collection includes 2037 taxonomic units of plants, including 104 of Caucasian origin.
Quiet shady walkways of Botanical Garden have become RIP place of its founder, a prominent Russian geographer and botanist Andrei Krasnov. The baby of Krasnov, which started off with seedlings brought from two major expeditions led by him in the Southeast Asia, overstepped 100th anniversary and has become one of the most visited tourist attraction in Adjara.
Petra Fortress is located in the village of Tsikhisdziri in the Kobuleti district of Ajara. Built during the 6th century A.D., it held an important strategic position at the crossroads of the route linking Georgia with Iran and Armenia. The fortress is one of the most significant monuments on the entire eastern coast of the Black Sea.
Petra is first referred to in the Novellae Constitutiones by the Eastern Roman emperor Justinian I, dated to 535. It was built to reinforce the Roman authority in the kingdom of Lazica, located on the southeastern shores of the Black Sea and, with the emperor's approval, was named in his honor as Petra Pia Justiniana. According to the contemporary historian Procopius, Petra was founded through the efforts of the Roman official John Tzibus, who thereafter exercised tight control of imports into Lazica and controlled local access to luxury commodities and much-needed salt. The name of Petra, literally, "rock" in Greek, was a reference to the rocky and precipitous coast where the city was built. Its location between the sea and the cliffs rendered the city inaccessible, except for a narrow and rocky stretch of level ground, which was defended by a defensive wall with two towers