Following brief periods of Roman and Khazar control, from the 9th century onwards, the area was part of the Byzantine θέμα Χερσῶνος Thema Khersonos (Province of Cherson).

Later that century, the Byzantine emperor Ἀλέξιος Κομνηνός Alexios I Komnenos (r. 1081–1118) was approached by Anglo-Saxon refugees, who had left England following the Norman conquest.

Alexios offered land to these refugees in Thema Khersonos if they could recapture it from the nomads and there is contemporaneous evidence that a Byzantine-English colony was subsequently founded.

Named after the province of Novorossiya,[citation needed] the port formed a vital link in the chain of forts known as the Black Sea Coastal Line, which stretched south to Sochi.

It was granted city status in 1866 and became the capital of the Novorossiysk Okrug and Black Sea Governorate, the smallest in the Russian Empire, in 1896.

[17] A small unit of Soviet sailors defended one part of the city, known as Malaya Zemlya, for 225 days beginning on February 4, 1943, and the town was liberated by the Red Army on September 16, 1943.

In 2003, President Vladimir Putin signed a decree setting up a naval base for the Black Sea Fleet in Novorossiysk.

[19] The Russian lease on port facilities in Sevastopol, which, though the main base of Russia's Black Sea Fleet, was part of Ukraine, was set to expire in 2017.

The description of the modern coat of arms sounds like this in official sources: In a gold shield with a black wavy tip is a black double-headed eagle crowned with an Imperial crown, with a scepter and a power in its paws, on the wings of which is a shield, in the scarlet field of which is a golden Orthodox eight-pointed cross mounted on a silver inverted crescent.

The most famous is Abrau-Dyurso, which consists of a townlet on the shore of Lake Abrau and a village on the coast of the Black Sea, connected by a winding mountain road.

The wineries of Abrau-Dyurso, established by Tsar Alexander III in 1870, produce table and sparkling wines for domestic consumption.

Since the driest month has 36 mm (1.4 inches) and may or may not happen consistently in the summer, the city cannot be classified as solely humid subtropical or Mediterranean.