Archaeological evidence indicates that the city functioned as the capital of the
Colchis in the sixth to fifth centuries BC. It is believed that in the
Argonautica, a
Greek epic poem about
Jason and the
Argonauts and their journey to Colchis, author
Apollonius Rhodius considered Kutaisi their final destination as well as the residence of King
Aeëtes. Later, it was the capital of the kingdom of
Lazica until being occupied briefly by the
Arabs. An
Arab invasion into western Georgia was repelled by
Abkhazians jointly with Lazic and
Iberian allies in 736, towards c.786,
Leon II won his full independence from the
Byzantine Empire and transferred his capital to Kutaisi, thus unifying Lazica and Abasgia via a dynastic union. The latter led the
unification of the Georgian monarchy in the 11th century. From 1008 to 1122, Kutaisi served as the capital of the
Kingdom of Georgia, and, from the 15th century until 1810, it was the capital of the
Kingdom of Imereti. In 1508, the city was conquered by
Selim I, who was the son of
Bayezid II, the sultan of the
Ottoman Empire. During the 17th century, Imeretian kings made many appeals to the
Russian Empire to help them in their struggle for independence from the Ottomans. All these appeals were ignored as Russia did not want to spoil relations with the Ottomans. Only in the reign of
Catherine the Great, in 1768, were troops of general
Gottlieb Heinrich Totleben sent to join the forces of King
Heraclius II of Georgia, who hoped to reconquer the Ottoman-held southern Georgian lands, with Russian help. Totleben helped King
Solomon I of Imereti to recover his capital, Kutaisi, on August 6, 1770. Finally, the
Russian-Turkish wars ended in 1810 with the
annexation of the Imeretian Kingdom by the Russian Empire. The city was the administrative capital of the
Kutaisi uezd and the larger
Kutaisi Governorate, which included much of west Georgia. In March 1879, the city was the site of a
blood libel trial that attracted attention all over the Russian Empire. Nine
Georgian Jews from
Sachkhere were falsely accused of killing a Christian girl and using her blood for allegedly Jewish religious purposes. Kutaisi was a major industrial center before Georgia's independence on 9 April 1991. Independence was followed by the economic collapse of the country, and, as a result, many inhabitants of Kutaisi have had to work abroad. Small-scale trade prevails among the rest of the population. In 2011,
Mikheil Saakashvili, the president of Georgia, signed a constitutional amendment relocating the parliament to Kutaisi. On 26 May 2012, Saakashvili inaugurated the new
Parliament building in Kutaisi. This was done in an effort to decentralize power and shift some political control closer to Abkhazia, although it has been criticized as marginalizing the legislature, and also for the demolition of a Soviet War Memorial formerly at the new building's location. The subsequent government of the
Georgian Dream passed a new constitution that moved the parliament back to Tbilisi, effective from January 2019. ==Culture==