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 to sap a hill.