According to Agathias, there was a church in the town dedicated to St Stephen, after whom the city was renamed.

Kaukhchishvili (1963) links the name "Onoguris" with that of the Unagira Mountain and locate the town on halfway between Tsikhegoji-Archaeopolis in the west and Kutaisi in the east.

[4] During the Nokalakevi expedition in the 1980s, archaeological excavations were undertaken at the Abedati Fortress (Georgian: აბედათის ციხესიმაგრე), Martvili Municipality, and later research papers linked it with Onoguris.

[4] Lekvinadzehas[5] as well as Braund & Sinclair (2000) identified the town with modern Sepieti village, based on a 6th- or 7th-century Greek inscription addressing Saint Stephen in a basilica there.

In 2015, a small team from the Anglo-Georgian Expedition to Nokalakevi undertook an excavation of the site which they called Khuntsistsikhe ("the fortress of Khuntsi") which strengthen the identification, though they say more studies are needed to reach a conclusion.