Ordu

i.The Hazelnut Coast and Boztepe

Ordu sits on the long-running eastern Black Sea coast, between Samsun to the west and Giresun to the east. The provincial seat — also called Ordu (modern district name Altınordu) — is built at the foot of Boztepe, a 450-metre hill that rises directly from the sea and gives the city its characteristic narrow, terraced form along the harbour. The country northward falls sharply into the sea; southward, the steep wooded slopes of the eastern Pontic Alps rise to over 3,000 metres at the inland border with Sivas and Erzincan provinces. The climate is the typical eastern Pontic mixture of mild winters, rainy summers, and the high humidity that supports the country's principal crop.

That crop is the hazelnut (fındık). Türkiye is the world's largest hazelnut producer (responsible for over 60 per cent of global supply), and Ordu province alone produces between a quarter and a third of the national crop — making it, by some margin, the principal hazelnut-producing province on earth. The annual Altın Fındık Festivali ("Golden Hazelnut Festival") in early August at Ordu draws producers from across the eastern Pontic coast.

ii.Cotyora — the Sinopean Colony and Xenophon's Anabasis

The historic-period settlement on this site was the small Greek colonial city of Cotyora (Greek Kotýōra) — a 5th-century-BCE foundation of Sinope on the Pontic coast (see our Sinop essay), one of a chain of Sinopean colonies along the eastern Black Sea coast. The site is identified by modern Turkish archaeologists with the small headland at Bozukkale, near the modern Kirazlimanı Cemetery in central Altınordu district.

Cotyora's most famous classical-period episode is its appearance in Xenophon's Anabasis — the long Greek prose narrative of the retreat of the Ten Thousand Greek mercenaries who, after fighting for the Persian pretender Cyrus the Younger at the Battle of Cunaxa in 401 BCE, made their way northwest across the Persian empire to the safety of the Black Sea coast. The Ten Thousand reached the Pontic coast at Trapezus (modern Trabzon) in early 400 BCE; from there they marched westward along the coast, reaching Cotyora in the spring of 400 BCE. The Anabasis records that the Ten Thousand stayed at Cotyora for forty-five days — long enough to repair their gear, debate their next move (Xenophon describes the debate in book V), and finally embark on Sinopean ships for the journey westward to Sinope and Heraclea Pontica. The 45-day stay at Cotyora is among the best-attested episodes of any small Black Sea coastal site in classical literature.

iii.Pharnaces I and the 2nd-Century Evacuation

Through the Hellenistic centuries Cotyora was absorbed by the rising Pontic kingdom (see Samsun and Sinop for the wider Pontic framework). Around the early 2nd century BCE, under King Pharnaces I, the Pontic state evacuated Cotyora's population and resettled them in the new royal foundation at Pharnakeia (modern Giresun), 50 kilometres east. The Cotyora site was abandoned; by the Roman period the small coastal settlement at modern Ordu had moved to slightly different ground but the broader country continued as part of Roman provincial Pontus.

iv.Roman, Byzantine, and Komnenian

Under the Romans the Ordu coast was part of the province of Bithynia-Pontus and (later) Helenopontus; it was a minor coastal region with no city of metropolitan importance. The Byzantine centuries continued the pattern: the coast was a working frontier of the contracting empire, repeatedly raided by Arab and later Russian (Varangian) forces. After the Latin sack of Constantinople in 1204, the eastern Black Sea coast was incorporated into the Empire of Trebizond under the Komnenos dynasty (see our Trabzon essay); the modern Ordu country remained Komnenian until the 15th century. The principal Byzantine and Komnenian site of the province is the small Eski Bozukkale harbour fortress on the modern coast.

v.Turkish Settlement and the 1455 Ottoman Ordu

The Turkish presence on the eastern Black Sea coast developed gradually through the 14th and 15th centuries as Turkmen federations of the eastern Anatolian plateau spread northwest into the Pontic country. Following the Ottoman annexation of the Empire of Trebizond in 1461 under Mehmed II, the small Ottoman administrative centre of Ordu was established. The modern city is, in fact, comparatively young: most of the surrounding hill country was developed under Ottoman timar settlements through the 16th and 17th centuries. The form Ordu derives from the Turkish word ordu ("army"), reflecting the city's origin as a working military settlement of the eastern Pontic Ottoman frontier.

vi.Late Ottoman Ordu and the Hazinedarzade

Through the 18th and 19th centuries Ordu was a steady working coastal sancak of the larger Trabzon Eyaleti. The principal civic patron of the city in the early 19th century was the Hazinedarzade family — a prominent Ottoman provincial âyân (notable) family that produced several Trabzon governors. Hazinedarzade Süleyman Paşa (governor of Trabzon 1827–1842) and his son Osman Paşa sponsored the major civic improvements of central Ordu, including the Hazinedarzade Süleyman Paşa Camii (1842) — the principal Ottoman-period mosque of the city — and the related fountains, baths, and the small commercial bedesten.

The 19th and early 20th centuries also saw the development of Ordu's distinctive eastern Pontic coastal economy: hazelnut from the foothill orchards, fish (especially the autumn palamut and hamsi runs) from the deep coast, and the small but persistent timber trade running inland to the Sivas-Erzincan plateau.

vii.The Republic and the Modern Province

Ordu was made a province under the Republican administrative reorganisation of 1920 (its boundaries have shifted modestly since). Under the TÜİK 2024 address-based registration count the province population is 770,711. The metropolitan municipality covers nineteen districts. The largest by population are Altınordu (~235,000, the central historic district and provincial seat), Ünye (~135,000, the western coastal town with its substantial Roman-period rock tomb and the Hittite-period mound at Tozkoparan), Fatsa (~128,000, on the same coast further west), and Perşembe (~31,000) on the small peninsula east of Altınordu. The smaller upland districts of Aybastı, Çamaş, Çatalpınar, Gölköy, Gülyalı, Gürgentepe, İkizce, Kabadüz, Kabataş, Korgan, Kumru, Mesudiye, and Ulubey occupy the foothill country south of the coastal districts.

The province is the seat of Ordu Üniversitesi (founded 2006). The provincial economy continues to balance the dominant hazelnut sector with fishing, timber, and the growing tourism industry centred on the Perşembe peninsula, the inland Çambaşı Yaylası high-pasture country, and the developing winter-sports centre at Çambaşı in southern Kabadüz district.

viii.Hazelnuts — the Black Sea Crop

The hazelnut is the agricultural identity of Ordu. The wild Corylus avellana grew on the eastern Pontic coast in antiquity (the Greeks called the nut karyon Pontikon, "the Pontic nut"); systematic cultivation on the modern scale dates to the 18th century, when Ordu and the surrounding coast became the principal Ottoman supplier of nuts to the imperial confectionery industry. Modern Türkiye produces approximately 700,000 tonnes annually — over 60 per cent of the global crop — and Ordu province alone produces between 150,000 and 200,000 tonnes a year, more than any other single hazelnut-producing region in the world. The harvest in August transforms the coastal districts: every village kahvehane, school garden, and family terrace becomes a hazelnut-drying station, and the regional kitchen — the Black Sea fındık tatlısı, the fındıklı çörek, the Ordu chocolate-and-hazelnut industry — runs on the crop.

The Ordu Fındık Araştırma Enstitüsü (Ordu Hazelnut Research Institute, founded 1937) at Altınordu is the principal Turkish research centre for the crop; the Fiskobirlik hazelnut cooperative — headquartered at Giresun but with major operations at Ordu — is the principal marketing-and-export organisation.

ix.What to See, in Order

The walking shape of Altınordu is small and runs along the harbour. From the central Atatürk Bulvarı the route runs to the Hazinedarzade Süleyman Paşa Camii (1842) on the seaward side, the Paşaoğlu Konağı ve Etnografya Müzesi — a restored late-Ottoman timber-framed townhouse housing the regional ethnographic collection — and the small Ordu Arkeoloji ve Etnografya Müzesi with finds from Cotyora, Roman Pontus, and the wider Pontic country. The historic Bozukkale (ancient Cotyora) site is on the eastern edge of the modern city.

The principal natural site of the central district is Boztepe, the 450-metre hill behind the city, reached by a cable car (teleferik, opened 2012) from the harbour. From the summit, the panorama covers the eastern Black Sea coast from Samsun in the west to Giresun in the east, with the Pontic Alps closing the southern horizon. For the wider province, the principal excursions reach Perşembe for the Yason Burnu chapel (the small peninsula traditional landing-site of Jason of the Argonauts, with a small 19th-century chapel still standing), Ünye for the Roman rock tomb in the eastern coastal cliffs and the Ünye Castle, and the Çambaşı Yaylası high-pasture country south of Kabadüz (with the developing winter-sports centre and the regional folk-dance traditions). The Ulugöl Tabiat Parkı in Gölköy district is the principal inland natural site.

The eastern Black Sea hazelnut coast — Sinopean Cotyora of Xenophon's forty-five-day stay, the Komnenian frontier, and the modern world capital of the hazelnut.

For the parallel Black Sea provinces, see Samsun to the west and the planned Giresun essay immediately to the east; for the Empire of Trebizond and the wider Komnenian framework, see Trabzon. For Türkiye's Black Sea coast in the wider sense, visit our sister site CountryOfTurkey.com.