Samsun

i.The Black Sea Coast and the Yeşilırmak Delta

Samsun sits on the central Black Sea coast of Türkiye, halfway between Sinop to the west and Trabzon to the east, at the point where the long arc of the Pontic shore swings southward and the river Yeşilırmak reaches the sea through one of the two great alluvial deltas of northern Anatolia. The coast here is wide and gentle — sandy beaches running for kilometres in either direction — and the country immediately inland is the rolling, well-watered hill country of the lower Pontic, with hazelnut groves, tobacco fields, and the small market towns of Çarşamba, Bafra, and Vezirköprü. The Pontic Alps rise in earnest forty kilometres south of the city, separating the coast from the inland Anatolian plateau.

The geography is unusual on the Pontic coast for being so open. Most of the Black Sea seaboard of Türkiye — from Sinop east to the Georgian border — is a narrow coastal strip between the Pontic mountains and the sea, with no significant plain. Samsun is one of two places (Trabzon is the other, smaller) where a real lowland gives the city room to breathe.

ii.Amisos — the Milesian Colony

The historic-period city on this site was founded in the 7th century BCE by Greek colonists from Miletus on the Aegean coast and named Amisos. It was the second Milesian colony on the Black Sea (after Sinope, modern Sinop, founded around 630 BCE), and through the Archaic and Classical centuries one of the most successful — a fortified harbour town on a small peninsula four kilometres west of the modern city (today's Cedid Karadeniz quarter), exporting grain, timber, and Pontic-mountain metals to the Greek mainland in return for olive oil and Aegean manufactures.

iii.The Pontic Kingdom and Mithridates VI

After Alexander the Great's conquest of Asia Minor in the 330s BCE, Amisos came under the authority of the small but eventually substantial Kingdom of Pontus, a Persian-descended Hellenistic monarchy that ruled the southern Black Sea coast from a series of capitals — including Amisos itself for parts of the 1st century BCE. The kingdom's greatest ruler was Mithridates VI Eupator (reigned 120–63 BCE), the last serious adversary of the late Roman Republic in the East, who fought three long wars (the Mithridatic Wars) against Sulla, Lucullus, and Pompey. Amisos under Mithridates was substantially refounded as a royal city; the Pontic king built a palace, a citadel on the headland, and the city walls whose foundations still survive.

The end came in 71 BCE. The Roman general Lucullus besieged the city; when the walls were finally breached, the defenders — Mithridates' garrison — burned much of Amisos themselves before withdrawing. Lucullus is reported by Plutarch to have wept at the destruction. The standard modern treatment of the period is Adrienne Mayor's The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates (Princeton UP, 2010).

iv.Roman and Byzantine Amisos

Roman Amisos was rebuilt as a civitas libera ("free city") of the new province of Bithynia et Pontus; it kept its Greek constitution and its considerable wealth through the long Roman peace. The younger Pliny, governor of Bithynia et Pontus in 110–113 CE, mentions Amisos in his letters to Trajan. Through the Byzantine centuries the city continued as a working naval base and trading port — much reduced from its Hellenistic peak, but never lost. The forms Amisos / Amisus shifted, in Arabic-period geographers and later Turkmen mouths, through Samsa, Samsun, to the modern Turkish name.

v.The Seljuk Capture and the Genoese Trade

The Seljuk Turkish capture of Amisos came in the second half of the 12th century — the standard scholarly date is around 1185, though some sources push it slightly earlier. Under the Anatolian Seljuk Sultanate of Rûm the city was renamed Samsun and grew into one of the major trading ports of the southern Black Sea, surpassing Sinope as the principal eastern outlet for the trans-Anatolian caravan trade. A substantial Genoese trading colony — operating under treaty with the Seljuks and later with the Trebizond Empire — handled the long-distance trade in slaves, silk, and grain from the city's harbour through the 13th and 14th centuries. The standard scholarly source for the Pontic Genoese and Byzantine network is Anthony Bryer and David Winfield's The Byzantine Monuments and Topography of the Pontos (Dumbarton Oaks, 1985).

vi.From Bayezid I to the Ottoman Recovery

Samsun was taken by the Ottoman sultan Bayezid I at the end of the 14th century — Britannica gives the date as the 1390s. After the catastrophic Ottoman defeat by Timur at the battle of Ankara in 1402, the city reverted briefly to the local Turkmen Candaroğlu beylik; the Genoese, sensing the political vacuum, burned their part of the town before withdrawing. The Ottomans recovered Samsun definitively in 1425 under Murad II, and through the long Ottoman centuries it remained a working Black Sea port of moderate importance — never as large as Istanbul or Trabzon, but a steady regional capital.

vii.The 19th-Century Tobacco Port

The transformation of Samsun into a major industrial centre came in the second half of the 19th century, with the development of tobacco cultivation in the surrounding plain — particularly in the Bafra and Çarşamba districts on either side of the Yeşilırmak delta. The light Turkish tobacco varieties developed here became, from the 1880s onward, one of the principal export crops of the Ottoman empire; Samsun was the port through which they reached Europe, the United States, and Egypt. The Régie des Tabacs — the French-led tobacco monopoly that operated from 1883 under the European-controlled debt administration — opened its principal Anatolian processing plant here in 1884. The Tütün İskelesi (Tobacco Quay) on Samsun harbour is the surviving physical monument of this period.

The tobacco economy attracted migration: substantial Greek-Orthodox and Armenian merchant communities settled here through the 19th century, and through the 1910s the city had one of the most cosmopolitan demographies of the Pontic coast. The exchange of populations signed at Lausanne in January 1923 closed that cosmopolitan period; under the Republic the city's population became, as elsewhere on the eastern Black Sea, essentially Muslim and Turkish-speaking.

viii.19 May 1919 — Mustafa Kemal's Landing

The single most consequential date in Samsun's modern history is 19 May 1919. Following the Armistice of Mudros (30 October 1918), the Ottoman government had appointed Mustafa Kemal Paşa Inspector of the 9th Army with orders to oversee the demobilisation of Ottoman forces in northern Anatolia. The appointment was approved by Sultan Vahdeddin on 30 April 1919. Mustafa Kemal and a staff of eighteen officers boarded the elderly Ottoman steamer SS Bandırma in İstanbul on 16 May 1919 and reached Samsun three days later, on the morning of 19 May 1919.

The landing was, in formal terms, the assumption of his army inspectorate. In substance it was the beginning of the National Struggle (Millî Mücadele). Within days of his arrival in Samsun, Mustafa Kemal Paşa was in correspondence with the regional Ottoman commanders, organising the Anatolian resistance to the Allied occupation. He stayed in the city from 25 May to 13 June 1919, in the Mesudiye Oteli on the central avenue (now restored as a museum), before moving inland to convene the regional congresses at Amasya (June 1919), Erzurum (July), and Sivas (September). The date 19 May is observed in the Turkish national calendar as the Atatürk'ü Anma, Gençlik ve Spor Bayramı — "the commemoration of Atatürk, of Youth, and of Sport" — the founding date of the Republic's symbolic narrative of its own origin.

The original SS Bandırma was scrapped in 1925; a full-scale steel replica, the Bandırma Vapuru Müzesi, was built and moored at the harbour in 2003. It is now the principal pilgrim site of the city.

ix.The Republic and the Modern Province

Republican Samsun grew steadily through the 20th century, anchored by the tobacco economy, by the modernised port, and from the 1930s onward by light industry and agricultural processing. The Samsun–Sivas railway, completed in 1932, gave the city its first inland rail connection. Under the TÜİK 2024 address-based registration count the province population was 1,377,546, making it the principal city of the central Black Sea coast and the seventh-largest in Türkiye by metropolitan population. The metropolitan municipality covers seventeen districts; the largest by far is İlkadım (the central historic district, ~322,000), followed by Atakum (the modern western suburb, ~245,000), Bafra (~143,000), and Çarşamba (~141,000).

The city is the seat of Ondokuz Mayıs Üniversitesi (founded in 1975, and named — like the boulevard and the stadium — for the date of Mustafa Kemal's landing) and of Samsun Üniversitesi (founded 2018). Its economy today combines the older agricultural base (tobacco still, but increasingly hazelnut, dairy, and tea) with steel and shipyard industries on the modern western port and a growing tourism sector around the 19 May 1919 commemorative landscape and the Black Sea coast.

x.What to See, in Order

The walking shape of historic Samsun runs along the harbour. From the central Cumhuriyet Meydanı the route runs west along the coastal boulevard to the Atatürk Anıtı — the equestrian statue marking the spot where, in the conventional account, Mustafa Kemal Paşa stepped ashore on 19 May 1919 — and then to the Bandırma Vapuru Müzesi, the full-scale steel replica of the steamer, moored on the quay. Continuing along the harbour the route reaches the Atatürk Evi ve Müzesi, the small house where Mustafa Kemal stayed in late May and early June 1919 before moving south to Havza, now a small commemorative museum.

The Samsun Müzesi at the western edge of the central district holds the Amisos archaeological collection, including the Amisos Treasure — a set of Hellenistic gold jewellery and the silver Pontic-period drinking vessels recovered in the 1990s. The reconstructed walls of Hellenistic Amisos can still be traced in the Toraman Tepe headland four kilometres west of the centre. Around the city, the half-day excursions reach the tobacco country at Bafra, the Çakırlar village complex at the Yeşilırmak delta, and the small Pontic-period sites of the Vezirköprü plain.

The Milesian Amisos on the open Black Sea coast — and the harbour where, on 19 May 1919, Mustafa Kemal Paşa stepped ashore from the SS Bandırma to begin the National Struggle.

For the National Struggle organisation that followed the landing, see our essays on Amasya (the Amasya Circular of 22 June 1919) and Sivas (the Sivas Congress of 4–11 September 1919). For the Black Sea coast in the wider sense, see Trabzon further east. For the Pontic coast and Türkiye's seas generally, visit our sister site CountryOfTurkey.com.