Mangup Fortress

The fortress ensemble of Mangup (or the defensive system of Mangup) is a system of fortress structures built on the plateau of the outlier mountain Baba-Dag and constituting a complex of defensive walls and towers, reinforced by natural barriers in the form of high rocky cliffs. Mangup is a giant refuge fortress, atypical for the late Middle Ages, with a total area of 90 hectares, which included not only the town itself with its garrison but could also shelter additional contingents of troops and the population of the surrounding valleys with their livestock and other property. It encompassed both the flat surface of the mountain and the upper reaches of the ravines cutting into the massif from the north.

Historians accept that the functioning fortress complex consisting of these three elements took shape rather late, not before Mangup became the capital of the Principality of Theodoro (14th–15th century), when the principle of successive defence that prevailed in the ancient and medieval eras was finally implemented, according to which the fortification had a main fortress enclosure (the "Main Line", the earliest and the most complex in construction terms), a "second line" (a retrenchment, or rear position), and a citadel on the Teshkli-Burun cape. The natural inaccessibility of the plateau, bounded over most of its perimeter by rocky cliffs up to 70 m high, was reinforced when the fortress was created by walls blocking passage at all accessible points.

Machine-translated from “Крепостной ансамбль Мангупа” on the Russian Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Mangup Fortress ranks #7,510 of 7,738 worldwide in the atlas's castle fame ranking, and #165 of the 183 mapped in Ukraine. Founded 600, it is older than 97% of the atlas's dated landmarks — one of 37 atlas entries founded in the 6th century. 24 more atlas landmarks stand within 25 km. The nearest day-trip guide is Sevastopol, 22 km away. See how Ukraine compares in the castle statistics.

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Read the full history on Wikipedia (in Russian) ↗