Bitlis Castle

Bitlis Castle is a castle built in Bitlis in 312 BC by Badlis, one of the commanders of Alexander the Great. The name of the city of Bitlis also derives from this commander.

The walls of the castle, built on steep rocks between two streams in the centre of the city of Bitlis, are 2800 metres long. Sources state that within the castle there were a khan palace, a mosque, a bedesten and houses. Of these works only the castle has survived to the present day. There are 670 embrasures around the castle. Because the castle was built on steep rocks, there is no defensive moat around it. Restoration work on the castle, begun in 2004, continued for a long time at intervals.

During the reign of Umar ibn al-Khattab, in 641, Iyad ibn Ghanm conquered Bitlis and its castle. The city, which passed under the rule of the Seljuk dynasty in the time of Malik-Shah, was definitively incorporated into Ottoman territory in the time of Suleiman the Magnificent. Bitlis, which remained under Russian occupation for 5 months in 1916 during the First World War, was reincorporated into Turkish territory on 8 August 1916 by the attack order given by Mustafa Kemal, Commander of the 16th Corps.

Machine-translated from “Bitlis Kalesi” on the Turkish Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Bitlis Castle ranks #6,600 of 7,738 worldwide in the atlas's castle fame ranking, and #100 of the 126 mapped in Turkey. See how Turkey compares in the castle statistics.

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Read the full history on Wikipedia (in Turkish) ↗