Since the border with Georgia was opened in the early 1990s, the Black Sea coast road has been widened and the town is much wealthier than it used to be.

Current Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's family has its roots in Rize and the local university is named after him.

Its Latin forms are Rhizus and Rhizaeum, the latter of which is used in the Catholic Church's list of titular sees as the name of bishopric of the town, which was once part of the late Roman province of Pontus Polemoniacus[4]).

In his Periplus of the Euxine Sea,[10] he described it as a city founded at the mouth of the river of the same name, the ancient and Byzantine ῾Ρίζιος ποταμός.

[11] Dated to 130–131AD and written as a letter to Roman Emperor Hadrian, the work records how its author, the governor of Cappadocia, made a tour of the Eastern Black Sea territories that formed part of his jurisdiction, first visiting the Roman Empire's Eastern Anatolian frontier garrisons before pushing on to the Black Sea coast in the Trabzon (Trebizond) region.

On the basis of the 1921 Treaty of Kars, Soviet Russia granted Rize to Turkey along with the other territories of Artvin, Ardahan, and Hopa (Georgian: ხუფათი).

[15] The city's climate is defined by mild temperate conditions, with warm summers, cool winters and heavy rainfall year-round with a maximum in late autumn (October to December).

The water temperature, typical for the Black Sea coast, is never too warm or cold, fluctuating between 8 and 20 °C (46 and 68 °F) throughout the year.

Given the lack of rail transit, most goods have to travel by truck or ship, which makes exporting and importing difficult.

Rize's primary trading partner is Trabzon, the most developed city of the northeast Black Sea region.