Kastamonu

i.The Pontic Forests and the Gök Çay

Kastamonu sits in the western Pontic forest country of Türkiye, on a small alluvial plain in the valley of the Gök Çay (ancient Amnias) at 775 metres, with the long forested ridges of Ilgaz Dağı (2,587 m) closing the country to the south and the steep-and-densely-wooded slopes running northward to the Black Sea coast at İnebolu, Cide, and Abana. The province is one of the most heavily forested in Türkiye — over half of its surface area is under forest, and the long Kastamonu pine, fir, and beech stands are the principal commercial timber resource of the country. The provincial seat is enclosed by hills on three sides, with a small Byzantine-and-Candaroğlu citadel on a rocky shoulder above the old town.

ii.Castamon — the Ancient and Byzantine Town

The historic-period town on this site is attested in late Byzantine sources as Castamon (Greek Kastamóni), a small fortified centre in the western Paphlagonian-and-Pontic frontier country. The medieval Byzantine forms of the name — Castamoun, Kastamuni — shifted, in the Turkmen mouths of the 13th century, to the modern Kastamonu. The earliest substantial Byzantine reference is in the 11th century, by which time the city was a working military-and-civil centre of the Byzantine frontier with the advancing Turkmen presence.

iii.The Çobanoğulları and the Candaroğlu Beylik (1291–1461)

After the Battle of Manzikert in 1071, Turkmen forces gradually established control over the western Pontic country. The first Turkmen dynasty to rule Kastamonu was the Çobanoğulları (c. 1071–1291), a frontier-emirate family allied with the Anatolian Seljuk Sultanate of Rûm. The Çobanoğulları held the city for nearly two centuries as a working second-tier beylik of the Seljuk frontier.

The transformation came in 1291, when Şemseddin Yaman Candar, a Turkmen emir of Mongol-period Anatolia, took the city and established the Candaroğlu (İsfendiyaroğulları) Beyliği — one of the major post-Seljuk Anatolian principalities of the 14th and 15th centuries. The Candaroğlu ruled an extensive territory from the Marmara coast at Sinop to the central Anatolian foothills, with their capital at Kastamonu and a secondary seat at Sinop. The dynasty produced, in the 14th and 15th centuries, several major emirs (Adil Bey, Bayezid Bey, Süleyman Paşa, Mahmut Bey, İsfendiyar Bey — the eponym of the alternative dynasty name) and a substantial architectural-and-literary culture.

The standard scholarly reference for the Candaroğlu is Yaşar Yücel's Anadolu Beylikleri Hakkında Araştırmalar (Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1991). Britannica's plain summary: "The Candaroğlu dynasty (1291–1461) ruled the wider Kastamonu-Sinop country as one of the principal post-Seljuk Anatolian beyliks."

iv.The Mahmut Bey Camii at Kasaba (1366) — UNESCO 2023

The single most distinctive monument of the Candaroğlu period — and the most architecturally distinguished building of the province — is the Mahmut Bey Camii, a small timber-hypostyle mosque at the village of Kasaba, 18 kilometres northwest of Kastamonu city, built in 1366 by Mahmut Bey (son of Adil Bey of the Candaroğlu). The mosque is, in its construction, one of the most unusual surviving medieval Islamic buildings of Türkiye: a small rectangular timber prayer hall, with eight oak pillars supporting an oak ceiling, built — by tradition — entirely without metal nails using a sophisticated dovetail-and-binding joinery. The interior is covered in remarkably preserved painted decoration of the 14th and 15th centuries, with vegetal and geometric programmes in red, blue, ochre, and gold leaf.

In 2023, the Mahmut Bey Camii was inscribed by UNESCO on the World Heritage List as part of the serial inscription "Wooden Hypostyle Mosques of Medieval Anatolia" — a five-mosque grouping that also includes the Eşrefoğlu Camii at Beyşehir (Konya), the Arslanhane Camii in Ankara, the Sivrihisar Ulu Camii (Eskişehir), and the Afyonkarahisar Ulu Camii. The grouping recognises the distinctive Anatolian-Turkmen timber-hypostyle mosque tradition of the 13th–15th centuries — a tradition without parallel in the wider Islamic world. The Mahmut Bey Camii is the smallest but, in painted decoration, the most spectacularly preserved of the five.

v.Ottoman Annexation (1461) and the Long Provincial Centuries

The Candaroğlu Beylik came to an end in 1461, when Sultan Mehmed II — fresh from the conquest of Constantinople (1453) and Trebizond (1461) — absorbed the dynasty's territories on his eastward campaign. The last Candaroğlu ruler, İsmail Bey, was deposed; the dynasty's surviving members were resettled within the Ottoman state, and Kastamonu became a sancak of the new Anadolu Eyaleti. Through the long Ottoman centuries Kastamonu was a steady regional capital of the western Pontic country, with substantial timber-and-mining industries (the Küre copper mines in the northern hill country were among the principal Ottoman copper sources) and a working coastal trade through İnebolu and Cide.

vi.The August 1925 Hat Reform at Kastamonu and İnebolu

The Republican-era event that placed Kastamonu in the modern political consciousness of Türkiye was the Hat Reform (Şapka İnkılâbı) of August 1925. President Mustafa Kemal Paşa chose Kastamonu — a conservatively religious city of long Ottoman provincial tradition — as the venue for the symbolic introduction of Western dress to the Republic. Arriving in the city on 23 August 1925 wearing a Western-style Panama hat, he gave a series of speeches at Kastamonu, İnebolu, and the surrounding country between 24 and 30 August in which he formally announced the prohibition of the fez and the adoption of Western-style headwear. The famous "İnebolu Speech" of 27 August 1925 — delivered to the people of the small Black Sea coastal town — is one of the foundational documents of the Kemalist cultural reform programme.

The choice of Kastamonu was deliberate: by giving the reform's launching speech in a conservatively traditional Anatolian town rather than in Ankara or İstanbul, Mustafa Kemal Paşa made clear that the reform was intended to reshape the country at every level. The legislative enactment — the Şapka İktisâsı Hakkında Kanun (Law on the Wearing of Hats), no. 671 of 25 November 1925 — followed within three months. The Atatürk Evi Müzesi in central Kastamonu, in the house in which the president stayed during his August 1925 visit, is the principal commemorative site.

vii.The Republic and the Modern Province

Under the TÜİK 2024 address-based registration count the province population is 376,425, modestly declining year on year as the wider Black Sea rural exodus continued. The metropolitan municipality covers twenty districts. The central Merkez (~157,000) carries about 42 per cent of the provincial population. The major secondary centres are Tosya (~39,000) in the southern foothill country (with the Tosya tomato and the older Ottoman bazaar), Taşköprü (~37,000, the garlic-producing town of central Türkiye), Cide (~23,000) on the Black Sea coast, and İnebolu (~20,000), the historic port of the central Pontic coast and the venue of the 1925 hat-reform speech.

The provincial economy continues to balance forestry (the Kastamonu State Forestry Enterprise is one of the largest in Türkiye), agriculture (cereals, fruits, the Tosya rice, the Taşköprü garlic), copper mining (the Küre Bakır mines remain active), and the developing rural-and-mountain tourism centred on the Küre Dağları Milli Parkı in the northern part of the province. The province is the seat of Kastamonu Üniversitesi (founded 2006).

viii.What to See, in Order

The walking circuit of historic Kastamonu runs through the small old town below the citadel. From the central Cumhuriyet Meydanı the route runs to the Nasrullah Camii (1505, the principal Ottoman-period mosque of the city), the İsmail Bey Camii ve Külliyesi (1457, the last Candaroğlu external complex, completed just before the Ottoman annexation), the Atabey Camii (1273, the oldest standing mosque in the city, of Çobanoğlu period), the Kurşunlu Han (15th c., the small Ottoman caravanserai), the Kastamonu Kalesi on the rocky outcrop above the old town, and the Atatürk Evi Müzesi with its 1925 Hat-Reform exhibition. The Kastamonu Müzesi at Cumhuriyet Caddesi holds the regional archaeological-and-ethnographic collections.

For the wider province, the essential excursion is to Kasaba village 18 kilometres northwest of the city for the Mahmut Bey Camii (1366, UNESCO 2023) — a small, easily visited working mosque with an interior of remarkably preserved 14th-century painted decoration. The Black Sea coast at İnebolu — for the historic Ottoman quayside, the small Kıymet ve İhsanoğlu evleri (traditional timber-framed houses), and the small Hat-Reform commemorative monument on the Atatürk Bulvarı — is the second principal excursion. The Küre Dağları Milli Parkı in the northern country offers the wider Pontic-forest landscape.

The western Pontic forest country — Candaroğlu Kastamonu, the painted nail-free mosque at Kasaba, and the small Black Sea port where Mustafa Kemal Paşa took off the fez.

For the parallel Pontic forest provinces, see Çankırı to the south (sharing Ilgaz Dağı) and the planned Sinop essay to the north. For the Mahmut Bey Camii's UNESCO siblings, see Afyonkarahisar (Ulu Camii) and the planned Konya/Beyşehir piece on the Eşrefoğlu Camii. For Türkiye's Black Sea coast in the wider sense, visit our sister site CountryOfTurkey.com.