Trabzon

i.The Table-Shaped Headland

Trabzon rises from the eastern Black Sea in irregular terraces, from the harbour and the long lakeside esplanade in the north up the steep slopes of Boztepe in the south. Three deep stream gorges — the Değirmendere to the east, the Kuzgundere (or Tabakhane) in the centre, and the Zağnos to the west — cut the city from south to north and define its quarters. The high table-like land between the Tabakhane and Zağnos streams, above the harbour, carries the oldest known settlement remains of the city; from this peculiar tabular geography the city takes its ancient name. The Greek word trapeza means "table," and in the form trapezos ("table-shaped" or "trapezium-shaped") it gave the city the name by which Xenophon's Greek mercenaries would record it in the 4th century BCE.

Behind the city the Pontic Alps — known in Turkish as the Doğu Karadeniz Dağları — rise steeply to the south, walling Trabzon off from the Anatolian interior. The coastal strip on which the city stands is narrow and densely forested; the climate is humid subtropical, the wettest stretch of the Turkish coast, and the country is consequently green in a way that no other Turkish landscape is — close-set hazelnut orchards, tea terraces (the great tea-producing belt begins just east, at Rize), beech and chestnut forest on the mountain shoulders, fog drifting in from the sea in the mornings and lifting against the mountains in the afternoons. The geographical isolation of the Pontic coast from the rest of Anatolia is the single fact that has shaped the city's history more than any other.

A city of table-shaped terraces, set between the steepest stretch of the Pontic Alps and the deepest reach of the Black Sea.

ii.Trapezos: From the Milesian Colony to Xenophon

The indigenous peoples of the Pontic coast — the Colchians, the Drilae, the Macrones — were already long-settled along this country when, in the 8th and 7th centuries BCE, Greek colonists from Miletus arrived along the Black Sea and founded a chain of trading colonies. The first and most important was Sinope (modern Sinop), and Trabzon was counted among Sinope's sub-colonies. The settlement was called Trapezos from the start. The earliest attested mention of the name is in Xenophon's Anabasis, the great memoir of the march of the Ten Thousand — the army of Greek mercenaries who had served the Persian prince Cyrus the Younger and who, after his defeat, had to make their way back to the Greek world through hostile country. In 401 BCE, the Ten Thousand reached Trapezos and broke into the famous cry "Thalassa! Thalassa!" — "The sea! The sea!" — at the first sight of the Pontic shore that meant they were close to home.

From the 6th century BCE the Pontic coast came under Persian rule, organised as part of the satrapy known as Pontus Cappadocia. In 334 BCE Alexander's victories ended Persian rule across Anatolia, but the Pontic coast was sufficiently remote from Alexander's line of march that local power soon reasserted itself. From the early 3rd century BCE, an indigenous dynasty descending from the Persian satrap Ariantes II — through his son Mithridates I Ktistes, founder — established the Kingdom of Pontus, with its capital at Amasya on the Yeşilırmak. Trabzon entered the borders of the Pontic Kingdom around 280 BCE.

iii.Pontic Kingdom and the Roman Province

The Pontic Kingdom held the eastern Black Sea coast for nearly two and a half centuries, reaching its zenith under Mithridates VI Eupator ("the Great"), who in the early 1st century BCE fought three successive wars against Rome for control of the Black Sea and the Aegean. The last of these — the Third Mithridatic War — ended in 66 BCE, when the Roman general Pompey the Great defeated Mithridates V in the Kelkit valley and brought the Pontic Kingdom to an end. Trabzon passed at that moment under Roman rule, and would remain Roman, then Byzantine, for the next thirteen centuries.

From 27 BCE, under the imperial reorganisation of Augustus, Trabzon sat within the vassal-state of Pontus Polemoniacus; under Tiberius (14–37 CE) it was attached to the Roman province of Cappadocia. Under Nero (54–68) the city was granted the privilege of becoming a free city — the standard Roman honour for a community that conducted itself well — and Roman historians of the period describe Trabzon as "famous" and "wealthy." Under Vespasian (69–79), who reorganised the eastern frontier, the city was incorporated into the combined Cappadocia–Galatia Province.

iv.Hadrian's Construction and the Theme of Chaldia

The single most building-intensive moment in Roman Trabzon's history came under the emperor Hadrian (117–138). As across the empire, Hadrian invested heavily in the city: religious and military buildings, roads, aqueducts, and — most consequentially — an artificial harbour whose remains were still visible until recent times. Hadrian's harbour transformed Trabzon's relationship with the sea; for centuries afterward it would be the main Roman naval and commercial base on the eastern Black Sea coast.

After Hadrian the great age tapered. In 244 CE Trabzon lost the right to mint coins. In 276, the city was sacked and burned by a Gothic raid that swept across the eastern Black Sea region — one of the great traumas of late-Roman Pontus. Reconstruction came under the Tetrarchy (Diocletian, Maximian, Constantius, Galerius) at the beginning of the 4th century, attested in a surviving Latin inscription now in the Trabzon Museum. When the Roman empire formally divided in 395 CE, Trabzon fell to the Eastern Roman empire — the Byzantine empire — and stayed there.

Byzantine emperors continued to invest in the city. Justinian (527–564) restored the city walls and undertook a new round of building. Under Heraclius (610–641) the empire reorganised its administration into themes — military-administrative districts ruled by a single governor with combined civil and military authority — and during the reign of Theophilos (829–842), Trabzon became the capital of the Theme of Chaldia, the easternmost theme on the Black Sea, which would persist as a unit of Byzantine government for the next three centuries. Through the 8th and following centuries, Trabzon also weathered the Arab raids that pushed up from the Anatolian interior, holding its position as a frontier station on the long Byzantine north-eastern border.

v.The Empire of Trebizond (1204–1461)

The defining medieval moment for Trabzon came in 1204, when the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople and shattered the Byzantine state into a constellation of successor polities. Two grandsons of the late Byzantine emperor Andronikos I Komnenos — Alexios and David — fled Constantinople and, with the support of their kinswoman Queen Tamar of Georgia, established an independent state at Trabzon in the same year. The new polity styled itself the Empire of Trebizond (Komnenos Krallığı in the Turkish historiography), and would rule the eastern Black Sea coast for the next two hundred and fifty-seven years — outlasting Constantinople itself by eight years.

The Trebizond emperors maintained their independence by a careful diplomacy. They paid tribute when they had to (first to the Mongols, later to the Ottomans); they intermarried with the Anatolian Seljuks and later with the Turkmen confederations of the Akkoyunlu and Karakoyunlu; they kept open the sea route west to Constantinople and east to the Caucasus and Iran. The reign of Manuel I Komnenos (1238–1265) is reckoned the empire's golden age: the silver mines of Gümüşhane, in the mountain country south of the city, brought economic strength, and Manuel's coinage carried the title ho eutyches — "the most fortunate." The Hagia Sophia of Trabzon, the great church on a headland west of the old city, was built in this period and survives as one of the most important monuments of late-Byzantine architecture anywhere in the eastern Mediterranean.

From the late 14th century, Ottoman pressure on the Trebizond empire grew. Bayezid I's capture of Samsun in 1398 closed the western land approach and forced the Komnenoi to pay an annual tribute to the Ottoman state. For sixty years the arrangement held. In the late 1450s, David Komnenos (r. 1458–1461) — the last emperor — chose confrontation: he stopped paying the tribute, attempted to recover earlier payments through the diplomatic offices of the Akkoyunlu sultan Uzun Hasan, and reached out to the European powers with proposals for an anti-Ottoman alliance.

vi.The Conquest of 1461 and the Şehzade City

In the spring of 1461, eight years after the conquest of Constantinople, Sultan Mehmed II — Mehmed the Conqueror (Fatih Sultan Mehmet) — moved against Trabzon. The Ottoman fleet sailed up the Black Sea coast; the army, commanded personally by the Sultan, marched overland across the Pontic Alps in one of the legendary military marches of the period. The fleet blockaded the city from the sea while the army descended on it from the mountains. The siege did not last long. David Komnenos surrendered on 15 August 1461, the city was taken without sack, and the Empire of Trebizond came to an end. Mehmed II remained in Trabzon for several days, then appointed the Gallipoli sancak bey Kazım Bey as the first Ottoman governor of Trabzon and rode west.

Trabzon became, in the Ottoman administrative scheme, first a sancak governed by appointees of the sultan and then a centre of princely education. In 1470, the young Şehzade Abdullah, son of Mehmed II, was sent to Trabzon as sancak bey, accompanied by his mother Şirin Hatun; he remained until 1479. More importantly, in 1491 the young Selim — the future Sultan Selim I (Yavuz), "Selim the Stern" — was sent to govern Trabzon and stayed for more than twenty years, until his accession to the throne in 1512. It was during this long Trabzon governorship that, in 1494 (the Valilik source gives 1495; scholarship most commonly settles on the slightly earlier date), Selim's son Süleyman — the future Süleyman the Magnificent, called Kanuni ("the Lawgiver") in Turkish historiography — was born in the city. Süleyman would spend his childhood here, until the age of fifteen, and receive his first education in the city before being sent to govern Kefe (Caffa, in the Crimea) at fifteen and rising eventually to the throne his father seized in 1512. Trabzon was, for these two generations of the long 16th century, the imperial nursery.

In 1515, two years before becoming sultan in his own right, the still-young Selim commissioned in Trabzon the Hatuniye Camii — also called the Gülbahar Hatun Camii — built in the name of his mother. The mosque and adjacent türbe stand at the western edge of the old city and are the most important Ottoman religious monument the city carries.

vii.Ottoman Trabzon

In the 16th century, Trabzon was combined with the Lazistan Sancak — whose centre was at Batum on what is now the Georgian coast — and the combined territory was raised to the status of an eyalet (province), with Trabzon as its capital. The arrangement gave Trabzon administrative authority over the entire eastern Black Sea coast, from the Yeşilırmak in the west to the Caucasus, and made it one of the great Ottoman provincial capitals. Through the 17th and 18th centuries the city prospered as the eastern terminus of the Ottoman Black Sea trade and as the staging point for the overland route to Iran, which carried Persian silk west to the European markets through the Caucasus passes.

In 1867, a great fire burned through Trabzon, destroying many public buildings; the subsequent reconstruction produced much of the late-Ottoman urban fabric still visible in the old quarters. In 1868 the city was promoted to the status of a full vilayet (province) under the late-Ottoman administrative reform, with the Lazistan, Gümüşhane, and Canik sancaks all attached. By the late 19th century Trabzon was a major Black Sea port, with foreign consulates, a substantial mercantile community, and a railway plan that — though never realised in the Ottoman period — pointed to its commercial weight.

viii.The First World War and the Russian Occupation (1916–18)

Trabzon entered the First World War on the front line of the Caucasian theatre. From 1 November 1914, Russian forces crossed the eastern frontier into Ottoman Anatolia; the Ottoman state declared war on the Entente powers on 3 November and the Cihad-ı Mukaddes (Holy Jihad) on 14 November. The Russian Black Sea Fleet began the bombardment of the eastern Ottoman ports in the same month. On 17 November 1914, a twenty-three-vessel Russian fleet bombarded Trabzon, causing extensive damage and substantial casualties; further heavy bombardments followed on 8 and 11 February 1915, in which more than a thousand of the city's people were killed.

The Russian land advance intensified from 23 January 1916. The Ottoman battlecruiser Yavuz (the former German Goeben, transferred to Ottoman service in 1914) put into Trabzon harbour carrying heavy machine guns, mountain artillery, and two aircraft for the Caucasus front, but the Russian advance could not be stopped. Erzurum fell on 16 February 1916; Rize fell to combined naval and land assault on 24 February 1916. Through the spring the Russians pushed west along the coast. The people of Trabzon, together with the regular Ottoman forces, held out for twenty-two days and twenty-two hours at the line of the Baltacı stream in Of district, but with no reinforcement available the line broke; Of fell on 15 March 1916; Sürmene followed; the enemy reached the gates of the city.

On 14 April 1916, Russian forces entered Trabzon. (The Valilik account notes that a delegation of local Greeks notified the Russian commander, General Liakhov, that the Turks had evacuated the city on 15–16 April and invited him in; the dates between the formal Russian entry and the welcoming ceremony are reconcilable within a few days.) The Russian occupation that followed lasted one year, ten months, and ten days. The Muslim population of the city and the surrounding villages — those who had not been able to flee inland — suffered substantial violence and dispossession during the occupation, much of it perpetrated by local Greek and Armenian elements who collaborated with the Russian forces. Property was seized; movable wealth, cultural and religious objects, manuscripts and archive materials were carried away to Russia; many of the city's mosques were closed or repurposed.

ix.The Liberation of 24 February 1918 and the Republic

The Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 collapsed the Russian war effort. Russian troops on the Caucasus front began to withdraw; on 18 December 1917, the Erzincan Armistice was signed between the new Soviet authorities and the Ottoman command, freezing the front. When Armenian forces armed during the Russian period did not abide by the armistice and continued local actions, the Ottoman Third Army under Vehip Pasha was given orders to advance. On 11 February 1918 the general order was issued; the army advanced along two columns, one toward the Caucasus, the other — under Colonel Hamdi Bey (Pirselimoğlu), himself a Trabzonlu, commanding the 37th Division reinforced by the 123rd Regiment from Giresun — westward back along the coast toward Trabzon.

The retaking moved fast. Vakfıkebir was retaken on 14 February 1918; Akçaabat on 17 February; Trabzon itself on 24 February 1918, when units under Captain Kahraman Bey entered the city in three columns. The two-year ordeal of occupation, displacement, and migration ended. The subsequent Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (March 1918) restored Ottoman authority to the entire eastern frontier. Recovery was slow; the city the displaced population returned to was substantially ruined, its movable wealth carried east, and the worst single act of the occupation — the destruction of the provincial archive — left a permanent gap in the city's historical record. The annual commemoration of 24 February as Trabzon's Kurtuluş Günü (Liberation Day) is still observed.

x.Atatürk's Three Visits

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk visited Trabzon three times during the Republican period — in 1924, 1930, and 1937. The first visit, on 15 September 1924, was a state visit of substantial weight: the founder of the Republic, less than a year after the proclamation, coming to the great Black Sea city that had so recently emerged from occupation. The people of Trabzon designated the anniversary "Atatürk Günü" — Atatürk Day — and conveyed the designation to him by telegram. The wooden mansion in the Soğuksu quarter where Atatürk stayed in 1924 and on later visits was preserved as the Atatürk Köşkü (Atatürk Pavilion) and opened as a museum in 1943; it remains one of the most-visited Atatürk house-museums in the country.

xi.The Modern City: Hazelnuts, Hamsi, and the Pontic Alps

Modern Trabzon is a city of about 250,000 in the central districts, with a metropolitan population approaching half a million when the surrounding municipalities are counted, and a province total of around 819,000 (2022 census). The provincial economy rests on three pillars: the hazelnut (fındık), of which Türkiye produces roughly seventy per cent of the world supply and of which the Trabzon–Giresun–Ordu coast is the heart of cultivation; the fishery, centred on the hamsi (the Black Sea anchovy), which the Trabzon table treats with the seriousness other cuisines reserve for noble fish; and the yayla tourism of the Pontic Alps, where the high summer pastures of Uzungöl, the Sürmene yaylas, the Maçka highlands, and the dozens of small lakeside hamlets above the tree line have become, in the last two decades, one of the great domestic-tourism destinations of the country.

The Black Sea coast climate — humid, mild, lush — gives Trabzon a landscape unlike any other in Türkiye. The forests rise straight from the coast to the high tree line; the rivers run year-round; the mountain pastures are green into August. The cuisine reflects the country: cornmeal (mıhlama, the great Black Sea dish of stretched young cheese and butter cooked into cornmeal), the Karadeniz pidesi (the long oval pide of the region, often stuffed with cheese and egg), hamsili pilav (anchovy pilaf, hamsi laid across the top of a buttered rice), and the strong tea of the Rize coast that Trabzon drinks throughout the day. For the broader essay on the Black Sea table, see Anatolian Tables; for the recipes specifically, our sister site TurkishCooking.com.

The other modern face of the city is Trabzonspor — the football club founded in 1967, which between 1976 and 1984 won the Süper Lig six times in nine seasons, and which in 2022 won it again after a 38-year wait. Trabzonspor remains, statistically and culturally, the only club outside the Istanbul Big Three (Galatasaray, Fenerbahçe, Beşiktaş) to have won the Turkish top flight in the modern era, and the identification between the club and the city is unusually deep — the maroon-and-blue of Trabzonspor is, for most of the country, the visual signature of Trabzon.

xii.The Monuments: Hagia Sophia, Hatuniye, Sumela

Hagia Sophia of Trabzon (Ayasofya Camii) — the great 13th-century Komnenos-era church on the western headland, built under Manuel I as one of the finest expressions of late-Byzantine ecclesiastical architecture. The wall paintings of the interior — angels, prophets, scenes from the life of Christ, the donor portrait — are among the most important surviving examples of medieval Byzantine fresco anywhere in the eastern Mediterranean. The building was converted to a mosque after the 1461 conquest, became a state museum in 1964, and was returned to mosque function in 2013 by ministerial decree of the Republic of Türkiye. The frescoes are now partially curtained during prayer times and visible at other hours; the architectural ensemble is preserved intact.

Hatuniye Camii (Gülbahar Hatun Camii) — 1515, commissioned by the then-Şehzade Selim in the name of his mother Gülbahar Hatun, who is buried in the adjoining türbe. The complex is a classic early-16th-century Ottoman provincial mosque-and-tomb, simply proportioned, located at the western edge of the old city.

Sumela Monastery (Sümela Manastırı) — forty-six kilometres south of Trabzon, in the Maçka district, clinging to a cliff face above the Altındere valley at an elevation of nearly 1,200 metres. Founded in the 4th century CE by Greek monks (tradition gives the founders as Barnabas and Sophronios in 386); the surviving buildings are largely 14th-century; the monastery was patronised by Trebizond emperors and later by Ottoman sultans, who issued repeated fermans protecting the institution. Sumela was closed in 1923 with the Greek population exchange. The Republic of Türkiye has restored the complex in successive campaigns; the monastery reopened to visitors in 1979 and to once-a-year Orthodox liturgy in 2010, by arrangement with the Ecumenical Patriarchate. The site is among the most extraordinary architectural settings in Anatolia and one of the most-visited cultural attractions in the country.

Other monuments to make time for: the Boztepe hill behind the city for the view across the harbour and the Pontic coast; the Trabzon Müzesi (Trabzon Museum) for the late-Roman Latin inscription and the Komnenos-period material; the late-Ottoman wooden mansions of the Ortahisar and Pazarkapı quarters; and the small Komnenos-era Saint Eugenios church, now the Yeni Cuma Camii in the old city.

xiii.Visiting Trabzon Today

Trabzon is reached by air from Istanbul, Ankara, and İzmir into Trabzon Airport (TZX), a short drive east of the city; by long-distance bus from across the country; or by the coastal road from Samsun and Rize. There is no passenger rail. The land border with Georgia at Sarp (in Artvin province, about three hours east) is open and is the major overland crossing for the South Caucasus.

Three days is a sensible minimum. A full day in the city: the Hagia Sophia, the Hatuniye, the Atatürk Köşkü, the museum, and the long walk along the harbour and up Boztepe. A full day for Sumela and the Altındere valley, ideally with a half-day extension to Maçka and the lower yaylas. A full day for Uzungöl, the lake-and-mountain setting two hours south of the city that has become the iconic image of the eastern Black Sea coast. For travellers with more time, the yaylas of the Sürmene and Of districts to the east, the Soğanlı pass to the south (the route the Conqueror's army took in 1461), and the coastal road east to Rize, Hopa, and the Sarp frontier — these are the deeper country of the Pontic Alps and the Türkiye–Georgia coast.

The hamsi season is winter — broadly November to February — and is when the city's character is most concentrated; the festivals, the hamsi cook-offs, the long meyhane evenings around grilled and fried fish. The hazelnut harvest is August; the yayla season runs from June through September; the rains of the Black Sea coast can fall in any season but are heaviest in autumn and early winter.