Edirne

i.The City of Three Rivers

Edirne sits at the western edge of Türkiye, on the eastern Thracian plain (Trakya), at the confluence of three rivers: the Meriç (Greek Hebros, Bulgarian Maritsa), the largest river of Thrace, which runs westward from here to form the Greek-Turkish border before reaching the Aegean; the Tunca, which joins the Meriç from the north out of the Bulgarian Sredna Gora; and the smaller Arda, which joins them from the west out of the Rhodope mountains. The three rivers, the rich black soil of the plain, the easy passage between the Black Sea and the Aegean — these are the things that have placed cities here since the Bronze Age, and that made Hadrianopolis-Edirne the strategic key to whichever empire held the Balkans.

ii.Hadrianopolis — the Roman Foundation

The pre-Roman name of the place, preserved in late-classical sources, was Uskudama, a Thracian fortress on the elevation above the meeting of the Tunca and the Meriç. Strabo calls the site Orestia, after the legendary Greek founder. The city was rebuilt and given full municipal status by the emperor Hadrian around 125 CE, on his great eastern tour, and the new name Hadrianopolis — "the city of Hadrian" — survived in Greek and Latin into the Ottoman period (Adrianople), where it slowly shifted, through the chain Edrinus → Edrune → Edrene → Edirne, into the form the city now carries.

Roman Hadrianopolis was the capital of the late-imperial province of Haemimontus, on the main road from Constantinople to Singidunum (modern Belgrade). It was a wealthy provincial town with the standard apparatus of a Roman city — forum, baths, aqueduct — and it sat astride the strategic frontier of the lower Danube basin. That frontier produced its most famous historical moment: on 9 August 378 CE, just outside the city walls, the eastern Roman emperor Valens was defeated and killed by the Goths in the Battle of Adrianople, an event the ancient historian Ammianus Marcellinus called the greatest defeat of Rome since Cannae, and which modern historians have often treated as the symbolic end of the unitary Roman state.

iii.From the Goths to the Byzantines

The city survived the catastrophe of 378 and continued through the Byzantine centuries as a regional capital and a fortified node on the western frontier. It was sacked by the Avars in 591, raided by Bulgars and Pechenegs through the 9th and 10th centuries, fortified in stone by the emperor Theophilus in the 830s, and held — sometimes barely — through the Crusader period. In 1205 the Bulgarian tsar Kaloyan defeated the Latin emperor Baldwin of Flanders outside its walls in another famous battle; Baldwin was captured and died in a Bulgarian dungeon. The city returned to Byzantine control in 1265 and remained Byzantine until the Ottoman arrival.

iv.The Ottoman Conquest of 1361

The Ottoman state had crossed into Europe in 1352 with the small bridgehead at Gallipoli (Gelibolu); by the late 1350s its forces under Lala Şahin Paşa were active in Thrace. The conquest of Adrianople in 1361, under the personal command of the second Ottoman sultan Murad I, was the decisive step: it gave the Ottomans the largest city of Thrace, the strategic centre of the lower Balkans, and the base from which the conquest of the rest of the peninsula could be prosecuted. The Valilik's official chronicle dates the event to 1361; some Byzantine and Latin sources give 1362 or 1363. Murad made the city his European headquarters; within a few years, by about 1365, it had become — alongside Bursa — the principal capital of the growing Ottoman state.

v.The Ottoman Capital — 1361 to 1453

For nearly a century, until the conquest of Constantinople, Edirne was the centre of Ottoman political and military life. The European campaigns of Murad I (against the Serbs, ending at Kosovo Polje in 1389), of Bayezid I (the Nikopolis crusade of 1396), of Mehmed I (the reunification after the Timurid interregnum), and of Murad II (the Varna crusade of 1444 and the second battle of Kosovo in 1448) were all mounted from Edirne. The sultans built here on the same scale as at Bursa: the Eski Cami (1414, a multi-domed Friday mosque in the Bursa tradition, by Bayezid I and Mehmed I); the Üç Şerefeli Cami (1447, by Murad II, with its three-balcony minaret and four polygonal columns supporting an unprecedented 24-metre dome — a structural laboratory for what Sinan would later do at the Selimiye); the imperial Edirne Sarayı palace complex on the Tunca island, of which only the kitchens and the small hammam now survive; and the II. Bayezid Külliyesi (1488) west of the city, an exceptionally complete late-15th-century hospital and medical-school complex, now restored as the Türkiye Health Museum.

After 1453 the political function moved permanently to İstanbul, but Edirne remained a favoured imperial residence — the sultans came here every spring for hunting, for the hot baths at Soğukçeşme, and for the great campaigns into Europe that always assembled here. The imperial palace was used into the 19th century; it was destroyed in the Russo-Turkish war of 1877–78.

vi.Selim II, Mimar Sinan, and the Selimiye (1569–1575)

The greatest single Ottoman monument of Edirne — and arguably of the entire empire — is the Selimiye Camii, the imperial mosque commissioned by Sultan Selim II from his chief architect Mimar Sinan (c. 1490–1588), and built between 1569 and 1575. Sinan was in his eighties when he began it. He had already built the Süleymaniye in İstanbul and the Şehzade and Mihrimah mosques; in his own autobiographical statement (the Tezkiretü'l-Bünyân) he called the Selimiye his masterpiece — the building "in which I have transcended my apprenticeship."

The mosque sits on a slight rise on the eastern edge of the historic city and dominates the Trakya plain for forty kilometres in every direction. Four three-balconied minarets, each 70.9 metres tall, frame a single great dome — 31.3 metres in diameter, just larger than the dome of Hagia Sophia, and supported on eight slender piers that give the prayer hall an interior of almost unbroken open space. The interior is revetted in İznik tiles from the peak period of their production; the mihrab wall is the single greatest concentration of these tiles in the empire. Around the mosque, the full külliye — two medreses, a dârülkurra (Qur'ān school), a covered market (Arasta) whose rents endowed the foundation, a fountain court, and a small muvakkithane (timekeeper's house) — completes the most harmonious imperial complex Sinan built. Gülru Necipoğlu's The Age of Sinan (Princeton, 2005) is the standard modern scholarly treatment.

vii.The Edirne of the Wars — and the Liberation of 25 November 1922

The 19th and early 20th centuries placed Edirne, by its geography, at the centre of every Balkan crisis. The city was occupied by Russian forces in 1829 (the Treaty of Edirne ended that war), again in 1878 (the Russo-Turkish War; the Russian advance reached the city's western edge before the Treaty of Berlin returned it), and during the First Balkan War it was besieged by the Bulgarian army for five months from November 1912. The garrison under Şükrü Paşa held out until 26 March 1913, when the city fell. It was recovered four months later, on 21 July 1913, by Turkish forces under Enver Bey during the Second Balkan War, and the population received the returning army with the celebrations recorded in the Turkish historical memory of the period.

The First World War left Edirne formally Ottoman but militarily exposed. Under the Treaty of Sèvres (1920) Eastern Thrace was assigned to Greece, and Greek forces occupied the city through 1920–1922. The Turkish recovery of Edirne and the rest of Eastern Thrace came not by combat but by the diplomatic settlement of the Armistice of Mudanya on 11 October 1922; Greek forces withdrew across the Meriç under the supervision of an Allied commission, and the Turkish administration returned. The date of 25 November 1922 is observed annually as the Kurtuluş of Edirne — the city's liberation from occupation. The boundary settled at Mudanya, on the line of the Meriç, has been the western boundary of Türkiye ever since.

viii.Kırkpınar — the Oil-Wrestling

Edirne is also the home of the oldest continuously held sporting competition in the world: the Kırkpınar Yağlı Güreşleri, the annual oil-wrestling tournament held on the Sarayiçi meadows by the Tunca, just outside the historic palace site. The tradition is traced — by both popular memory and the formal Ottoman record — to the campaigns of Süleyman Paşa in the 1340s, when forty Turkish warriors are said to have wrestled at this spot for the championship and forty springs (kırk pınar) burst from the ground. The annual tournament, conducted by the same rules ever since (no time limit, no weight classes, contestants in leather kıspet trousers oiled in olive oil), is held over three days in late June or early July; the Başpehlivan — the head wrestler — is among the great folk-heroes of the Trakya region. Kırkpınar was inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2010, a separate (intangible) inscription from the architectural property listed below.

ix.UNESCO 2011 — the Selimiye Complex

In 2011, UNESCO inscribed the Selimiye Mosque and its Social Complex on the World Heritage List as an architectural property under cultural criteria (i) and (iv). The inscription rationale identifies the building as "a masterpiece of the human creative genius of the architect Sinan, the most famous of all Ottoman architects in the 16th century," and singles out the harmonious integration of the mosque, the four minarets, the courtyard, the two medreses, the dârülkurra, the Arasta market, and the timekeeper's house as the most successful realisation ever achieved of the Ottoman külliye as a single architectural and institutional whole. The Iznik-tile interior decoration is cited in the ICOMOS evaluation as the most complete surviving example of the peak period of Ottoman tile production.

x.What to See, in Order

The walking shape of Edirne is small. From the central square — the Cumhuriyet Meydanı, with its statue of the wrestler — the route runs east toward the Selimiye Camii on its hill, with the small Türk ve İslâm Eserleri Müzesi in one of its medreses and the Arasta market in the other. Returning west, the visitor passes the Üç Şerefeli Cami (1447) and the Eski Cami (1414), both within a few minutes of each other; the historic Bedesten (1418), the city's first covered market, lies between them. Two blocks south is the Tunca and the bridges — the great Tunca Köprüsü (1452) and the long Meriç Köprüsü (1842) — that carry the road westward toward the Bulgarian and Greek borders.

An afternoon walk crosses the Tunca to the small island where the imperial Edirne Sarayı ruins survive in a quiet meadow, and continues to the II. Bayezid Külliyesi (1488) further west: the great hospital court, the medical school, and the small imaret kitchen, now arranged as the Sağlık Müzesi (Health Museum). For Kırkpınar, the Sarayiçi meadows by the Tunca are five minutes from the centre; the wrestling festival itself is held the last week of June into the first week of July.

The Ottoman city of the western frontier — Hadrian's Adrianople, the second imperial capital, and Sinan's masterpiece on the Trakya hill.

For the first Ottoman capital that Edirne stood alongside, see Bursa; for the third capital that succeeded both, see İstanbul. For Türkiye's frontier geography in the wider sense, visit our sister site CountryOfTurkey.com.