Düzce

i.The Plain Between the Mountains and the Sea

Düzce occupies one of the smallest and most coherent provincial territories in Türkiye. The land is essentially a single feature — a flat alluvial basin some thirty kilometres across, set between the wall of the Bolu Mountains to the south and the rolling Pontic foothills that fall, more gently, toward the Black Sea coast at Akçakoca to the north. The plain is drained by the Melen Çayı and its tributaries, whose silt has built the basin floor over geological time. Around its edges, beech and oak forest climbs toward the high ridges; in the middle, the land is laid out in the dark-soiled fields of the hazelnut and maize country.

The province sits on the great east-west corridor that has carried traffic between Constantinople and the Anatolian interior since antiquity, and that today carries the TEM motorway — the trans-European O-4 — between Istanbul and Ankara. The mountain wall to the south is breached by the Bolu Dağı Tüneli, a twin-bore motorway tunnel under the high pass between Düzce and Bolu, opened in stages in the mid-2000s and one of the more substantial engineering works of modern Turkish infrastructure. Before the tunnel, the long climb over the Bolu pass was a notorious bottleneck on the national road network — closed for days at a time in winter by snow.

The climate is the transitional one of the western Pontic coast: wet, mild, and forested by Black Sea standards, but with cold winters once you climb the southern wall. Average annual rainfall on the plain exceeds eight hundred millimetres, and on the coast at Akçakoca rather more. The agricultural map follows the rain: hazelnut orchards on the better-drained slopes, maize on the alluvial flats, tobacco in the smaller valleys, dairy from the high yaylas. The Düzce plain is among the most productive lowlands of the western Black Sea, and a substantial share of Türkiye's hazelnut crop — the country supplies, in most years, the great majority of the world market — comes either from Düzce itself or from the immediately adjacent provinces of Sakarya, Zonguldak, and Giresun.

A plain between two mountains and a sea — Bithynian, Byzantine, Konur Alp's, Circassian, and only since 1999 a province in its own right.

ii.Prusias ad Hypium — the Bithynian and Roman City at Üskübü

The historic city on the Düzce plain stood not where the modern provincial capital now stands but a few kilometres to the north, in the place the Ottomans knew as Üskübü and that the Republic later renamed Konuralp. The original settlement was a small Thracian-Bithynian town of the western Pontic interior — known in Greek sources as Hypios or Kieros — that around the middle of the third century BCE was refounded and renamed by King Prusias I of Bithynia (reigned c. 230–182 BCE), the same Hellenistic monarch whose dynastic name attaches to Prusa, the future Bursa. To distinguish the two Prusiases, the eastern one took its epithet from the local stream, the Hypios (the modern Melen): Prusias ad Hypium, "Prusias on the Hypios."

Roman annexation came with the rest of Bithynia in 74 BCE, under the bequest of the last Bithynian king Nicomedes IV. Prusias ad Hypium remained a small but architecturally serious provincial town through the early Roman centuries, with the standard apparatus of a Roman municipium: an agora, an aqueduct, baths, and — most visibly today — a stone theatre cut into the slope above the modern village, with seating for perhaps four to five thousand spectators. Fragments of the city walls, sections of the aqueduct, and inscribed altars from the city's local cults survive in the ground and in the nearby Konuralp Archaeological Museum, where the Roman sculpture and inscriptions excavated over the last century are now displayed. The site has been the subject of intermittent excavation since the early Republican period and, more systematically, of work directed from Düzce University in recent years.

The town passed without dramatic incident through the long Byzantine centuries, lapsing — like much of the western Pontic interior — into a small bishopric and a smaller market. By the late Byzantine period it had shrunk well within its Roman walls; the great theatre had been quarried for stone; the wider plain was administered from Byzantine fortified centres at Hereke on the Marmara coast and at Akçakoca on the Black Sea, both of which would change hands during the Ottoman conquest.

iii.Konur Alp and the Early Ottoman Conquest

The Ottoman absorption of the Düzce plain belongs to the same campaign that brought Bursa into Ottoman hands in 1326, Nicomedia (modern İzmit) in 1337, and the eastern Marmara hinterland into the new emirate's territory across the same decade. The commander charged with the northern flank of that campaign — the country between the Sakarya river and the Black Sea coast — was one of Orhan Gazi's senior frontier commanders, Konur Alp. He appears in the early Ottoman chronicles, in Aşıkpaşazade and the later compilations, as one of a small group of frontier begs — alongside Akça Koca, after whom Akçakoca is named, and Gazi Abdurrahman — who brought the western Pontic country under Orhan's authority in a sequence of campaigns through the 1320s.

Konur Alp's capture of the Düzce plain is conventionally dated to the early 1320s; the Üskübü area passed into Ottoman administration as a small Turkmen settlement on the ruins of the older Bithynian-Roman city. Konur Alp himself died not long after the conquest and was buried near the new Turkmen settlement, where his türbe — a modest domed tomb chamber in the early Ottoman style — still stands and remains an active object of local veneration. When the Republic in 1934 required the country's many places named with the older Ottoman or non-Turkish forms to take Turkish names, Üskübü was renamed Konuralp in his honour. The town today is a quiet outlying settlement of the modern provincial capital, a few kilometres to the north of the city; its single great asset, for the traveller, is the archaeological complex of Prusias and the museum.

iv.Akçakoca and the Black Sea Coast

The province's window onto the Black Sea is the district of Akçakoca, named, as above, after the Ottoman frontier commander who took the coast for Orhan Gazi. The district occupies a stretch of about thirty kilometres of low coastline between the small headland at Karaburun in the east and the mouth of the Melen in the west. The land falls in low, wooded hills to a series of small sand-and-pebble beaches; the seaward face of the hills is planted, characteristically, in hazelnut.

The district centre, also called Akçakoca, is a small Black Sea seaside town that — in the manner of Türkiye's western Pontic coast — fills modestly with domestic holiday-makers from Istanbul and Ankara through the high summer and empties again in autumn. Its principal historic structure is the Ceneviz Kalesi, the small Genoese castle on a low headland above the harbour, built in the late medieval period when the Genoese maintained a network of small fortified trading stations along the southern Black Sea coast between their main Crimean base at Caffa and their Marmara hub at Pera (Galata). The castle was lost to the Ottomans, with the rest of the coast, during Konur Alp's campaigns; only its lower walls and a fragment of a tower survive today, but the site, with its long view east along the surf line, is worth the modest climb.

The fishing village of Cuma Köyü, on a small inlet a few kilometres west of the town, retains a more workaday character — small wooden boats drawn up on the sand, the local Cuma Köyü Camii at the centre of the village, and a handful of seasonal fish restaurants along the waterfront. The Akçakoca coast is among the gentlest in temperament along the western Black Sea: no industrial port has been built here, the railway has never come closer than fifty kilometres inland, and the coastal road, the D-010, follows the old shore route between Sakarya in the west and Zonguldak in the east through a landscape that is more orchard than town.

v.The Circassian and Abkhaz Villages — the 1864 Diaspora on the Düzce Plain

The most distinctive demographic feature of Düzce among the western Black Sea provinces is the substantial presence, across the villages of the plain and the lower foothills, of communities of Adyghe (Circassian) and Abkhaz descent. They are the descendants of the great Caucasian expulsion of 1864 — the catastrophe, in Circassian historical memory, in which the Russian conquest of the northwest Caucasus drove the surviving Adyghe and Abkhaz populations off the Black Sea littoral and into Ottoman territory. The Ottoman government, faced with the largest single refugee movement in its modern history, settled the new arrivals where it had underused agricultural land to give them — and one of the principal settlement zones was the Düzce plain.

Successive waves of settlement continued through the late 1860s and 1870s, and again after the further Caucasian and Balkan dislocations of the 1877–78 Russo-Turkish War (the 93 Harbi; see also our Sakarya essay). The villages founded in this period — many still carrying the names of the Caucasian clans or districts from which they came — today form a substantial part of the rural population of central Düzce, of the smaller districts of Çilimli, Gümüşova, Cumayeri, and of the lower hill country toward Akçakoca. The plain's Çerkez köyleri — the Circassian villages — retain in many places an active sense of the Adyghe language (the western group, Kabardian and Adyghe proper) and of the distinctive Caucasian dance and craft traditions; Düzce hosts one of the more active Kafkas Kültür Derneği chapters in the country, and a recognisable Adyghe cuisine — beef and walnut dishes, sour-cream sauces, the particular Caucasian bread called haliva — persists at the level of the village kitchen. A smaller Abkhaz community, with its own language and cultural association, is concentrated in the eastern villages of the plain.

vi.Visiting Today

The modern province has eight districts: the central Düzce (with Konuralp now within its boundary), Akçakoca on the coast, and the six outlying districts of Çilimli, Cumayeri, Gölyaka, Gümüşova, Kaynaşlı, and Yığılca. The provincial population of about 410,000 is more than half urban — concentrated in the central city, with substantial secondary populations at Akçakoca and along the motorway corridor at Gümüşova and Kaynaşlı. The city of Düzce itself, almost entirely rebuilt after 1999, has the slightly self-conscious orderliness of a town with a date-of-birth: wide grid streets, low buildings on engineered foundations, generous municipal parks where older quarters once stood.

Beyond Konuralp and Akçakoca, the province's principal attractions cluster in the foothills of the Bolu Mountains. Lake Efteni (Efteni Gölü), south-west of the city, is a small shallow wetland — a remnant of the older lake that once covered much of the Düzce plain — and one of the more important bird-migration stations on the western Black Sea flyway, with a designated wildlife reserve managed by the Directorate General of Nature Conservation. The Hasanlar Dam in the south-east of the province, on the Küçük Melen, supplies the plain with irrigation and flood control and offers a quiet drive along a forested reservoir. The Samandere and Pürenli Şelalesi waterfalls, in the wooded country between Yığılca and Gölyaka, are the principal woodland walks of the province — short, signposted approaches from the local road, with the falls themselves stepping down through beech and oak forest into shallow rock pools.

For the rest of the western Pontic coast, see Zonguldak and Karabük; for the Bithynian framework of which Prusias ad Hypium and Konur Alp's conquest are both episodes, see Bursa, Kocaeli, and Bolu; for the 1864 Caucasian diaspora in the wider Anatolian frame, see also Sakarya. For Türkiye's western Black Sea coast in the wider sense, visit our sister site CountryOfTurkey.com.