Gaziantep Castle — Attraction in Şahinbey

Gaziantep Castle

Gaziantep is a large city in southern Turkey with over one million people in its metropolitan area and a long history as a city above Mesopotamia and the Levant as well as a crossing point to the Taurus Mountains into Anatolia. As such, it contains a large, hilltop castle at the center with a park, museums, restaurants, shops and homes all around it. It is quite imposing in its height and wouldn’t be easy to attack if you were so inclined. At the bottom, a ditch fortified with a stone counterscarp and scarp lines the base of the hill and loopholes are inserted into the side of the scarp which lets defenders fire arrows at attackers who climb down the ditch. Atop the scarp is a large rampart of earth, the hill itself, cloaked in a layer of stone and forming a natural talus. On top of this wall sits the actual castle which is roughly circular and consists of 12 towers linked through curtain walls. There are circular towers, square towers (common in Muslim castles), polygonal towers and at least one horseshoe tower which have different architectural elements. These include corbels and windows below the top, as well as loopholes at the base for firing arrows along with loopholes in the walls for the same reason. The parapet is not crenellated (likely because the natural defenses are more than sufficient) however something may have been there in the past as the corbels should have been used for something. One of the towers (to the far right) specifically has a bretèche with machicolations which let you throw things down at people underneath them. The main entrance to the castle is a gateway arch which leads to a small bridge spanning the ditch. On the other side is a cobbled path heading up to the castle’s main gate. The gate is quite large but upon entering you’ll notice that the interior isn’t a courtyard but a long hallway which is at an incline going upwards. You’ll eventually emerge at the top of the castle, filled in with dirt, with a walkway behind the stone walls. It could just as easily be called the Citadel of Gaziantep for its height and resemblance to Aleppo or Damascus save for the fact that the hills around the city are higher. If you were to go about assaulting this castle it wouldn’t be easy. The typical strategy of taking a castle by force (if tricks or treating is unavailable) involve climbing over its walls to try and open the main gate to let your army inside or assaulting the walls with siege weapons and possibly combining this with mining/sapping the walls to collapse them and let the soldiers run in. Specifically, this hill forms a talus which leans back from the attackers and makes it harder to use any sort of ladder. Descending into the ditch to start scaling the walls is also dangerous because of all the loopholes which let archers shoot at you and the walls and machicolations which lets the defenders drop things on top of you. You could fill in the ditch with dirt and try to make a rampart up to the castle walls but this would be difficult with attacks coming from above and the steep incline needed for construction. Siege engines such as catapults, trebuchets, ballistae and battering rams would damage the castle but they don’t help you get up to the top of the walls and you’re not going...

Gaziantep Castle is the first castle built by the Hittite Empire as an observation point and later built into a major castle by the Roman Empire on top of a hill in the center of Aintep, Turkey in the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD. The castle underwent further expansion and renovation during the reign of Emperor Justinian The first in the period between 527 and 565 AD. The perimeter of the castle is circular in shape and it is located on an area of ​​1200 meters. The castle walls are built of stone and the castle consists of 12 towers. The castle was renovated several times and took its final form in the year 2000. Today, the castle is used as a panoramic museum, which documents the heroics of the city's defense against the French armed forces, after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, and the museum works periodically. The castle is located in the middle of the city, rising on a hill overlooking the city. Surrounded by old markets and traditional industries, it is a microcosm of the historic Aleppo Citadel in its urban style. Very nice and amazing...

Amazing experience. Only 10 lira (~.50 cents USD). An historic place, with a story to tell, from Hittite times to Roman and Byzantine, to the more recent times of the War of Independence. You will be surrounded by ruins from eras spanning thousands of years, and unlike the adversaries of the old proprietors of the castle, you will be allowed easy entry, after crossing the old drawbridge site that hangs over a Byzantine moat, and brought through the main gate into a passageway that spirals to the terrace access point. Along the way in this spiral hall you will find much information in Turkish and English about the history of Gaziantep in the context of the Fall of the Ottoman Empire up to the War of Independence. It is a bit overwhelming and dense, to be honest. I found myself skipping the majority of the reading, but on arriving to the top you do feel yourself looking over history in a way as it plays...