The Rioni (რიონი ; , Phâsis) is the main river of western Georgia. It originates in the Caucasus Mountains, in the region of Racha and flows west to the Black Sea, entering it north of the city of Poti (near ancient Phasis). The city of Kutaisi, once the ancient city of Colchis, lies on its banks. It drains the western Transcaucasus into the Black Sea while the river Kura drains the eastern Transcaucasus into the Caspian Sea.
History
Ancient authors
Known to the
ancient Greece as the river
Phasis, the Rioni was first mentioned by
Hesiod in his
Theogony (l.340); Plato has Socrates remark: "I believe that the earth is very large and that we who dwell between the pillars of Hercules and the river Phasis live in a small part of it about the sea, like ants or frogs about a pond" (
Phaedo, 109a). Later writers like Apollonius Rhodius (
Argonautica 2.12.61),
Virgil (
Georgics 4.367) and
Aelius Aristides (
Ad Romam 82) considered it the easternmost limit of the
navigable seas.
Herodotus and
Anaximander considered Rioni a boundary between Europe and Asia.
The famed voyage of
Jason and the
Argonauts, though semi-mythological, was said to have occurred by the Argonauts sailing up the river Phasis from its outlet to the Black Sea at Poti, to Colchis (modern
Kutaisi in Georgia).
Pheasant
The term "
pheasant" and the scientific name
Phasianus colchicus are derived from "Phasis" and "Colchis",
as this was said to be the region from which the common pheasant was introduced to Europe
[''Oxford English Dictionary, Draft Revision, September 2009] (the
common pheasant were introduced later from
East Asia).
Draining
It is said that "the failure of Colchis to emerge as a strong kingdom or to be maintained as a province of Rome has been blamed on the pestilential climate of the Phasis Valley, a situation remarked upon by travelers down to modern times, when the swamps were finally drained."
[Robert H. Hewsen, Armenia: A Historical Atlas, 2001, page 38] Wetlands around Rioni River has been drained through a large reclamation-drainage project commissioned by government in 1960. After that, the area was cleared and converted to agricultural land.
Description
The Rioni is the longest river wholly within the borders of Georgia. The river is long, and its
drainage basin covers about .
[ Statistical Yearbook of Georgia: 2020, National Statistics Office of Georgia, Tbilisi, 2020, p. 12.] It starts on the southern slopes of the Caucasus Mountains at above sea level, north of the town of Oni. Its largest tributaries are, from source to mouth:
Jejora (left),
Qvirila (left),
Khanistsqali (left),
Tskhenistsqali (right) and
Tekhuri (right).
Phasis river at Taprobana
Stephanus of Byzantium wrote that there was also another river which was named Phasis, in
Taprobana (), as the Indian Ocean island of Ceylon or Sri Lanka was known to the ancient Greeks.
[ Stephanus of Byzantium, Ethnica, § Ph660.2]
