The Sukhumi Cathedral of the Annunciation is an Eastern Orthodox church in the city of Sukhumi, the capital of Abkhazia, an entity in the South Caucasus with a disputed political status. The cathedral was built in a Neo-Byzantine fashion by Sukhumi's then-vibrant Greek community between 1909 and 1915. It was then consecrated in the name of St. Nicholas and was, therefore, popularly referred to as Greek Nicholas Church. In the 1940s, after the expulsion of most of local Greeks by the Soviet government under Joseph Stalin, the church passed to the Georgian Orthodox Church as a replacement for its former diocesan cathedral church demolished by the Soviet authorities about a decade earlier. It was reconsecrated in the name of Annunciation and remained one of the few functioning churches on the