Kızkalesi
Kız Kalesi
Interesting facts
- The Byzantine admiral Eustathios Kymineianos is credited with fortifying the islet on the orders of Alexios I Komnenos in the early 12th century.
- While the mainland castle opposite was built largely from reused ancient masonry, the Armenian walls on the island used freshly cut, rusticated ashlar.
- The Armenians of Cilicia called the fortress Gorygos, and the town on the shore was still known as Ghorgos before taking the castle's Turkish name.
- In 1360 Peter I of Cyprus took over the island at the request of its own inhabitants, as the Armenian kingdom of Cilicia was collapsing.
- The Ottoman capture of the castle in 1471 was led by Gedik Ahmed Pasha, then grand vizier of the Ottoman Empire.
- The south and west walls meet at a right angle, while the north and east sides are wrapped by a single curving rampart.
- Not far inland lies the Corycian Cave, a vast sinkhole that ancient writers named as the lair of the monster Typhon and praised for its saffron.
- In the Turkish telling of the legend, the king had prayed for years for a child before his doomed daughter was born.
Why it is worth it
A castle seems to float on the sea about 300 metres off the beach of Kızkalesi, its pale walls and towers rising straight from the water of the Mediterranean. Kızkalesi, the "Maiden's Castle", covers almost the whole of a tiny island of about 15,000 square metres, once called Crambusa, on the coast of ancient Cilicia in southern Turkey; on the shore opposite stands its twin, the land castle of Corycus.
Strabo recorded that the island served as a pirates' haunt in antiquity. The fortress itself was probably first built by the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos after the First Crusade, and its southern side, with square towers, still follows that Byzantine plan. In the thirteenth century the kings of Armenian Cilicia rebuilt it extensively; inscriptions are reported to record work by Leo I in 1206 and Het'um I in 1251. They added the rounded towers and rusticated masonry of the north and west walls and a barrel-vaulted chapel inside, and the island was once linked to the mainland fortress by a breakwater. The castle later passed to Peter I of Cyprus in 1360, to the Karamanid beylik in 1448 and to the Ottomans in 1471. Its curtain wall runs for 192 metres, with eight towers each of a different shape, a main gate on the north and a smaller gate on the west.
The name comes from a legend shared with several other places in Turkey. A king, local tradition holds, was told by a soothsayer that his beautiful daughter would die of a snake bite, so he built her a castle on an island where no snakes could reach her; yet a snake hidden in a basket of grapes sent from the mainland bit her all the same. The village of Kızkalesi on the shore, the ancient Corycus, still has its land castle and remains of the ancient city, and in 1482 the Ottoman prince Cem Sultan sailed from here into exile.
Getting there
The castle lies offshore from the village of Kızkalesi on the D400 coastal highway, about 23 km from Erdemli and 60 km from Mersin. Çukurova International Airport (COV) is about 96 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Kızkalesi is an island castle situated on a small island in Mersin Province of Turkey.
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