Akkale (literally "white castle") is the popular name given to ruins of a building complex in

Kumkuyu Kumkuyu is a town in Mersin Province, Turkey. Geography Kumkuyu is a Mediterranean coastal town in the rural area of Erdemli ilçe (district) which is a part of Mersin Province. It is on the Turkish state highway which traverses south Anatolia ...

town of

Erdemli Erdemli is a town and district of Mersin Province in the Mediterranean region of Turkey, west of the city of Mersin. Geography Erdemli is located between the districts of Mezitli (to the east) and Silifke (to the west). In the north, Erdemli i ...

district,

Mersin Province Mersin Province ( tr, ), formerly İçel Province ( tr, ), is a province in southern Turkey, on the Mediterranean coast between Antalya and Adana. The provincial capital and the biggest city in the province is Mersin, which is composed of fo ...

Turkey Turkey ( tr, Türkiye ), officially the Republic of Türkiye ( tr, Türkiye Cumhuriyeti, links=no ), is a list of transcontinental countries, transcontinental country located mainly on the Anatolia, Anatolian Peninsula in Western Asia, with ...

Geography

Akkale (also called ''Tırtar Akkale'' where ''Tırtar'' is the former name of Kumkuyu) is situated to south west of Kumkuyu at . Its distance to Erdemli is and to

Mersin Mersin (), also known as İçel, is a large city and a port on the Mediterranean Sea, Mediterranean coast of southern Turkey. It is the provincial capital of Mersin Province, Mersin (İçel) Province. It is made up of four municipalities and dis ...

is . The buildings are accessible by a short lane from the Turkish state highway . The distance to

Mediterranean Sea The Mediterranean Sea is a sea connected to the Atlantic Ocean, surrounded by the Mediterranean Basin and almost completely enclosed by land: on the north by Western and Southern Europe and Anatolia, on the south by North Africa, and on the ea ...

coast is about .

History

The original name of the site is not known. But it was a port administration complex of the

Roman Empire The Roman Empire ( la, Imperium Romanum ; grc-gre, Βασιλεία τῶν Ῥωμαίων, Basileía tôn Rhōmaíōn) was the post-Republican period of ancient Rome. As a polity, it included large territorial holdings around the Mediterr ...

built in the 4th century. However, according to Turkish archaeologist

Semavi Eyice Mustafa Semavi Eyice (9 December 1922 in Istanbul, Turkey – 28 May 2018 in Istanbul, Turkey) was a Turkish art historian and archaeologist, who specialised in the study of Byzantine and Ottoman art in Istanbul. Professor Eyice is widely re ...

the main building may be the palace of

Archelaus of Cappadocia Archelaus ( el, Ἀρχέλαος; fl. 1st century BC and 1st century, died 17 AD) was a Roman client prince and the last king of Cappadocia. Family and early life Archelaus was a Cappadocian Greek nobleman. His full name was ''Archelaus Sisin ...

who lived in the first century and was known to spend summers in

Cilicia Cilicia (); el, Κιλικία, ''Kilikía''; Middle Persian: ''klkyʾy'' (''Klikiyā''); Parthian: ''kylkyʾ'' (''Kilikiyā''); tr, Kilikya). is a geographical region in southern Anatolia in Turkey, extending inland from the northeastern coa ...

. A part of the buildings were repaired during the

Byzantine The Byzantine Empire, also referred to as the Eastern Roman Empire or Byzantium, was the continuation of the Roman Empire primarily in its eastern provinces during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, when its capital city was Constantinopl ...

era probably after the great earthquakes of the 6th century.

Technical details

Although the popular name ''Akkale'' means "White castle", the complex was not a castle, but a small, wealthy settlement. It consists of the ruins of the main building, which was once five stories in height, a large cistern, and numerous other constructions. The five-story building is traditionally called a palace ( tr, Akkale sarayı), for it may have been used both as the office and the lodging building of the governor. The

corbel In architecture, a corbel is a structural piece of stone, wood or metal jutting from a wall to carry a superincumbent weight, a type of bracket. A corbel is a solid piece of material in the wall, whereas a console is a piece applied to the s ...

s which are on all sides of the building indicate the existence of a now completely demolished balcony which circumscribed the building. The main staircase of the building was a spiral staircase. A small building is assumed to be the treasury office where documents may have been kept in the basement. The cistern is one of the biggest cisterns in Cilicia with over . It was used to sell water to ships. Within this complex is a free-standing rectangular structure which has one of the region’s few extant domes on pendentives and was thought to be a church. However, in 1989 an archaeological study was published with a plan, which describes the site as a mausoleum. This cruciform building was constructed with beautifully cuts blocks of limestone masonry.The survey was conducted under the auspices of the University of California at Berkele

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References

{{Mersin Province Ruins in Turkey Roman sites in Turkey Erdemli District Cisterns in Mersin Province Reservoirs in Turkey Archaeological sites in Mersin Province, Turkey Olba territorium