Giresun

i.The Hazelnut Coast and Giresun Adası

Giresun sits on the eastern Black Sea coast between Ordu to its west and Trabzon to its east, on a small headland that rises sharply from the sea to a fortified plateau at 500 metres. The provincial seat is built down the headland's seaward slopes in narrow tiers, with the historic citadel — Giresun Kalesi — crowning the summit. The country southward rises through steep wooded slopes to the Karadeniz Dağları and beyond them to Erzincan and Gümüşhane provinces; the coast itself, running east and west of the central city, is one of the most densely cultivated hazelnut-growing regions of the country.

One kilometre offshore, directly opposite the modern city, lies Giresun Adası — the only inhabitable island of the Turkish Black Sea coast, a small rocky outcrop the Greek sources call Aretias ("Ares' Island"). The island's mythological reputation is older than its history: in Apollonius Rhodius's Argonautica (3rd century BCE) the island is the place where Jason and the Argonauts encountered the man-eating birds of Ares — birds that dropped their bronze feathers on the heroes until the Argonauts drove them off with clashing shields. The island was, in late antiquity, also associated with an Amazon shrine. It is currently uninhabited and reached by small ferry from the central harbour.

ii.Choerades, Pharnakeia, and Cerasus

The historic-period city on this site was a colony of Sinope founded sometime in the 7th–6th century BCE under the original Greek name Choerades. By the 4th century BCE the city carried the name Pharnakeia, after the Pontic king Pharnaces I who substantially refounded the city in the early 2nd century BCE and resettled here the population of Sinopean Cotyora to the west (see our Ordu essay). The contemporary Greek geographer Strabo records the foundation: "Pharnakeia (Farnakia), built in the place of Cerasus, was founded by Pharnaces who gave it his name."

The Roman administrative form was Cerasus — the Latin transliteration of Greek Kerasos. The Latin form cerasum for the sweet cherry, from which English cherry, French cerise, German Kirsche, Italian ciliegia, and Spanish cereza all descend, is the principal etymological inheritance of the city: as the Roman authors record (Pliny the Elder, Natural History 15.30), the Roman general Lucullus, returning from his eastern campaigns against Mithridates VI in 67 BCE, brought the cultivated cherry from Cerasus to Italy, and from there the tree and its name spread across the Roman world. The Latin cerasum is, in this sense, the only word in the principal modern European languages directly traceable to a city on the Anatolian Black Sea coast.

iii.Xenophon's Anabasis and the Pontic Centuries

The pre-Hellenistic city is also recorded in Xenophon's Anabasis — the Ten Thousand passed through Cerasus in the spring of 400 BCE on their long retreat from Persia, after their 45-day stay at Cotyora to the west (Anabasis V.3). Xenophon describes Cerasus as a fortified Sinopean colony of about 600 hoplites' worth of population. Through the Hellenistic Pontic centuries the city was a working coastal centre under the Pontic kings; under Pharnaces I it received the substantial refoundation and royal name that gave it its second-century identity as Pharnakeia.

Under the Romans, after the destruction of the Pontic kingdom by Pompey in 63 BCE, Cerasus continued as a working second-rank coastal city of the new Roman province. The principal Roman-period authorities — Pliny, Arrian, Strabo — agree that the city was prosperous but never of metropolitan rank.

iv.Byzantine, Komnenian, and Ottoman

Through the Byzantine centuries the city continued as a working Pontic coastal centre; after the Latin sack of Constantinople in 1204 the eastern Pontic coast became part of the Empire of Trebizond under the Komnenos dynasty (see Trabzon), and Giresun was one of its principal subsidiary coastal cities. The Ottoman annexation came with the absorption of the Trebizond empire by Mehmed II in 1461; Giresun became a sancak of the new Trabzon Eyaleti and continued through the long Ottoman centuries as a working coastal port. The modern name Giresun is the Turkish-period rendering of Kerasos / Cerasus.

The principal medieval-and-Ottoman monuments of the city are the Giresun Kalesi (Byzantine-Komnenian foundations, much rebuilt by the Komnenoi and the Ottomans), the Seyyid Vakkas Türbesi on the citadel, and the small Çınarlar Camii. The Ottoman city extended down the slope from the citadel to the harbour in narrow stepped streets, much of which still survives.

v.Topal Osman and the National Struggle

The most consequential figure of modern Giresun is Topal Osman Ağa (1883–1923) — a Giresunlu militia commander who organised the irregular Black Sea Pontic forces in the early stages of the National Struggle. Following the 1919 Greek landing at İzmir, Topal Osman raised a substantial Giresun-based irregular battalion (the 42nd Regiment, the so-called "Topal Osman Müfrezesi") that fought in the western Anatolian campaigns under Mustafa Kemal Paşa, particularly in the Battle of the Sakarya (August–September 1921) and in the Pursuit Operation of August 1922. The 42nd Regiment was one of the most distinguished irregular units of the National Struggle.

Topal Osman's life ended in difficult circumstances. After the establishment of the Republic he served as head of the presidential guard at Çankaya, and was killed in an armed confrontation with the gendarmerie on 1 April 1923, the day after the assassination of the deputy Ali Şükrü Bey at his hands — an episode whose full circumstances remain contested in the Turkish historical literature. His remains were returned to Giresun and are buried at the small Topal Osman Anıt Mezarı in the central district, which is the principal commemorative site of the modern city.

vi.The Hazelnut and the Modern Province

Giresun, like neighbouring Ordu, is one of the principal hazelnut-producing provinces of Türkiye — generally ranking second after Ordu in annual production, with substantial coastal-belt production at Bulancak, Espiye, Tirebolu, and Görele. The Fiskobirlik hazelnut cooperative — the principal national producers' organisation — is headquartered at Giresun. The province is also famous for its cherries — the original Cerasus tradition is preserved in the surrounding orchards, and the Giresun aksuyu and tombul varieties are still cultivated for local consumption and the regional dried-cherry trade.

Under the TÜİK 2024 address-based registration count the province population is 455,922. The metropolitan municipality covers sixteen districts. The largest by population are Merkez (~144,000, the central historic district), Bulancak (~71,000) on the coast west of the central city, Espiye (~39,000), and Tirebolu (~33,000) on the coast eastward toward Trabzon. The inland upland districts — including the historic small town of Şebinkarahisar in the southern foothill country — are mostly small. The province is the seat of Giresun Üniversitesi (founded 2006).

vii.Şebinkarahisar and the Inland Country

The southernmost district of Giresun — Şebinkarahisar, in the high country on the Erzincan-Sivas border — is one of the most historically distinctive inland towns of the eastern Pontic country. The town, built on a steep rocky outcrop at 1,250 metres, was the Roman Colonia and the Byzantine Mauron Kastron ("the Black Castle," from which the Ottoman Karahisar derives). Under the Anatolian Seljuks and the Mengücekoğlu Beylik it was an important inland centre, with the surviving small Taş Han (caravanserai) and the great Şebinkarahisar Kalesi on the rocky outcrop above the town. The Ottoman annexation came in 1461 along with the rest of the Trabzon Empire's territories.

Until the early 20th century Şebinkarahisar was a sancak centre on the Sivas-Trabzon road; the wider region around it produces the famous Şebinkarahisar walnuts and the small but distinguished local raki tradition. The poet Yunus Emre is locally claimed (one of several places that claim him; the principal tradition places him at Sarıköy in modern Eskişehir province) as having visited or briefly resided here.

viii.What to See, in Order

The walking shape of historic Giresun is small and follows the slope of the headland. From the central Atatürk Bulvarı at the harbour the route runs up the stepped streets to the Giresun Kalesi (Byzantine-Komnenian citadel), the Topal Osman Anıt Mezarı on the upper terrace, and the small Seyyid Vakkas Türbesi within the citadel walls. The view from the upper citadel covers the central city, the harbour, and Giresun Adası one kilometre offshore. The Giresun Müzesi, housed in a restored late-Ottoman timber-framed building on Gazi Caddesi, holds the regional Pontic and Ottoman collections.

A boat from the central harbour (in the summer months) reaches Giresun Adası — the ancient Aretias — with its small Byzantine-period church ruins and the principal panoramic view back to the city. For the wider province, the principal excursions reach the coastal town of Tirebolu (with the small Byzantine Saint Jean Castle on the headland), the upland Bektaş Yaylası high-pasture country (a major regional folk-festival site each summer), and the small town of Şebinkarahisar in the southern foothill country for the citadel and Ottoman bazaar. The principal regional folk-music festival — the Aksu Festival — is held at central Giresun each May, dating to a folk-Christian-and-Turkish-syncretic tradition of throwing pebbles into the sea on 20 May (the local feast of Mihris).

The eastern Pontic harbour of Pharnakeia and Cerasus — Lucullus's cherry, the Argonauts' man-eating birds of Aretias, and the modern hazelnut-and-cherry coast.

For the parallel hazelnut coast immediately to the west, see Ordu; for the Komnenian Empire of Trebizond, see Trabzon; for the Pontic kingdom of which Pharnakeia was a foundation, see Samsun and Sinop. For Türkiye's Black Sea coast in the wider sense, visit our sister site CountryOfTurkey.com.