Poti (Georgian: ფოთი [pʰotʰi]; Mingrelian: ფუთი; Laz: ჶაში/Faşi or ფაში/Paşi) is a port city in Georgia, located on the eastern Black Sea coast in the region of Samegrelo-Zemo Svaneti in the west of the country.

Since Erich Diehl, 1938, first suggested a non-Hellenic origin of the name and asserted that Phasis might have been a derivative of a local hydronym, several explanations have been proposed, linking the name to the Proto-Georgian-Zan *Poti, Svan *Pasid, and even to a Semitic word, meaning "a gold river".

In Classical antiquity and the early Middle Ages, the area was occupied by the Greek polis of Phasis which was established by the colonists from Miletus led by one Themistagoras at the very end of the 7th, and probably at the beginning of the 6th century BC.

The famed Greek semi-mythological voyage of Jason and the Argonauts in search of the Golden Fleece would have entered Georgia at this port and traveled up the river to what is today Kutaisi.

Apparently, the lake which the well-informed Ancient Greek author Strabo reported as bounding one side of Phasis has now engulfed it, or part of it.

Yet, a series of questions regarding the town’s exact location and identification of its ruins remain open due largely to the centuries-long geomorphological processes of the area as the lower reaches of the Rioni are prone to changes of course across the wetland.

[3][4] The section along the river Phasis was a vital component of the presumed trade route from India to the Black Sea, attested by Strabo and Pliny.

It was where the Roman commander-in-chief Pompey, having crossed into Colchis from Iberia, met the legate Servilius, the admiral of his Euxine fleet in 65 BC.

[citation needed] A combined army of the western Georgian princes recovered Poti in 1640, but the town fell under the Ottoman sway again in 1723.

[9] At the beginning of World War I, on November 7, 1914, the Ottoman SMS Breslau appeared off the port of Poti and subjected the railway yards there to a bombardment that lasted three-quarters of an hour, without any direct results.

[10] During a brief period of independence in 1918–1921, Poti was Georgia’s principal window to Europe, also serving as the portal of entry for successive German and British expeditionary forces.

The Poti naval base was organized by the Soviet government in July 1941, a month after the German invasion during World War II.

After the German capture of Sevastopol and Novorossiysk in 1942, several destroyers were transferred to be based at Poti which, together with another Georgian port city, Batumi, functioned as a secondary harbor in the Black Sea Campaigns (1941–44).

At almost the same time, the Georgian government created a Joint Naval Brigade, consisting of several boats, a battalion of marines, an artillery division, and a communication detachment.

However, Georgia continued, though fruitlessly, to claim the vessels formerly stationed at Poti as a part of a tripartite Russo-Ukrainian-Georgian dispute over the Soviet Black Sea Fleet shares.