In the centre of Erzurum stand the medrese with the twin minarets, the Yakutiye medrese with its carved portal and the castle with its Tepsi Minare, and the Great Mosque of 1179 and three tomb towers complete the medieval set. The city adds Ottoman mosques by Mimar Sinan and others, a caravanserai full of Oltu stone workshops, and the house where Mustafa Kemal Pasha prepared the Erzurum Congress. The slopes of Palandöken begin ten minutes from the centre, the hilltops around town carry nineteenth-century redoubts, and to the north lie the Tortum waterfall, the Georgian churches of Haho and Öşvank, and the castles of Oltu and İspir.
The medreses, the Great Mosque and the tomb towers
The city's best-known building is the medrese with the twin minarets, put up by a Seljuk sultan at the end of the thirteenth century: an open, four-eyvan courtyard ringed by two storeys, roughly 35 by 46 metres. Since 17 July 2021 it has held the Foundation Works Museum, with about ninety restored objects in some ten rooms upstairs: manuscripts, carpets, candlesticks, mosque clocks and doors, a soup-kitchen cauldron, and models of the Kaaba and the mosques of Medina and Jerusalem by the local modelmaker Doğan Hattatoğlu.
The Yakutiye Medrese of 1310 was the work of Cemalettin Hoca Yakut Gazani, who dedicated it to Gazan Han and Bolugan Hatun under the Ilkhanid Oljaitu, and it is the largest closed-courtyard medrese in Anatolia. Stand in front of the west portal: in the side niches a tree of life made of palm leaves grows from a pierced sphere, with two leopards facing each other below it and a double-headed eagle at the top. Inside, under a muqarnas dome, an ethnography museum shows jewellery, dress, belts, copperware, weapons and coins. In 2014 the medrese went onto UNESCO's tentative list with the other great Anatolian Seljuk medreses.
The Great Mosque, also called the Atabey Mosque, is the oldest and largest in the city, built in 1179 under the Saltukids, who made Erzurum their capital after Manzikert. It covers about 52.5 by 41 metres, and five doors, no two alike, lead in. Look up at the dome over the mihrab: its wooden lattice, a swallow roof, is the original one and was shaped to draw damp out of the hall.
The Üç Kümbetler are three tomb towers of the twelfth to fourteenth centuries. The largest and oldest is held to be that of Emir Saltuk: eight-sided, in stone of two colours, with animals in the niches of its drum, a bull, a snake, a bat and an eagle, and a human head carved between the horns of the bull. Inside the walls, the Cimcime Hatun tomb carries an inscription of 1304, though who lies there is still argued over.
The castle and the Tepsi Minare
The inner citadel of Erzurum Castle is the one the Byzantine emperor Theodosius built in 415; inside are a brick bath, rooms, and an Ottoman mosque against the north wall. The outer walls have mostly fallen, and their gates survive as names: Tabriz, Erzincan, the Georgian Gate, İstanbul and Yeni Kapı. At the corner of the castle mosque stands the Tepsi Minare, built as that mosque's minaret in the twelfth century by a Saltukid ruler, as its inscription shows. It got a clock in the nineteenth century, a wooden top and a Baroque balcony, and people have called it the clock tower since. Its shaft is brick laid in a basket weave.
Ottoman mosques and the Rüstem Paşa Caravanserai
Lala Mustafa Paşa, conqueror of Cyprus and later grand vizier, was governor here when he had Mimar Sinan build the city's first mosque of the Ottoman period in 1562. It is a smaller cousin of the great İstanbul mosques, lit by twenty-eight windows; bullets fired during the Russian occupation scarred its tiles, and in the porch a marble panel records the tax exemption Mehmed IV granted the people in 1670. The Murat Paşa Mosque of 1573 has nineteenth-century flowers painted in oils around its dome. The Kurşunlu, properly Feyziye, Mosque of 1701 below the inner castle has a lead-covered dome, a muqarnas mihrab and a fine wooden minbar.
The caravanserai called the Taşhan was built in 1561 by Rüstem Paşa, Süleyman's grand vizier. Its inscription calls it a ribat, a frontier post, because Erzurum was a frontier city then. Thirty-two rooms on two storeys ring a rectangular courtyard, and today they are workshops and shops of the Oltu stone trade, turning the stone into prayer beads, rings, necklaces and other gifts.
Atatürk, the congress and the museums
Mustafa Kemal Pasha and Hüseyin Rauf Bey moved into the house that is now the Atatürk House Museum on 9 July 1919 and worked there for 52 days, until 29 August, preparing the Erzurum Congress. On show are the belongings of Kâzım Karabekir and others, photographs of the delegates, and the press on which the congress declarations and the paper Albayrak were printed. The congress itself first met in the old Sanasaryan school of 1864, now the Atatürk painting and sculpture museum.
The Erzurum Museum, which has had its own new building since 2021, starts downstairs with a mammoth fossil, obsidian and finds of the Karaz, Transcaucasian and Urartian cultures; upstairs come Seljuk and Ottoman work, folk dance and the craft of Oltu stone carving. Atatürk University has its own museums on the Yakutiye campus, among them the Ata ice museum, which the provincial directorate calls the only one in Türkiye.
The redoubts and Nene Hatun
Twenty-one forts stand on the hilltops around the city, the largest built from the early nineteenth century against Russian attacks, their rooms of stone set under thick earth. The two that matter most, Mecidiye and Aziziye, just east of the city, helped stop the Russian advance in the war of 1877–78, remembered locally as the War of '93. They now lie within the Nene Hatun Historical National Park, 387 hectares of trenches, emplacements, memorials and the Nene Hatun cemetery four kilometres from the centre.
Palandöken and the ski centres
Palandöken, which the provincial directorate calls Türkiye's first and most developed ski resort, has 44 runs totalling 51 kilometres, floodlit night runs and, besides skiing and snowboarding, paragliding, ice climbing and snowmobile safaris; outside the snow months its slopes are used for walks and picnics. Konaklı, 17 kilometres from the centre, is quieter, with eleven pistes between 2,200 and 3,185 metres, and Kandilli is the Nordic centre where the biathlon and cross-country races of the 2011 Winter Universiade were held.
North: Tortum, the Georgian churches and the castles
On the Erzurum–Artvin road, Tortum Lake formed in the eighteenth century when a landslide off Kemerli mountain blocked the Tortum stream. Where the lake spills over that natural dam, the Tortum waterfall drops forty-eight metres in a fall twenty-two metres wide, throwing up a rainbow. Steps lead down from the railed viewing balcony to the foot of the falls and back up the far side, and in spring the spray soaks the balcony.
In Tortum district, Haho church at Bağbaşı, the work of the Bagratid king David III between 976 and 1001, was later made a mosque, the Taş Cami; lions, bulls, eagles and griffins are carved inside and gospel frescoes cover the apse. Öşvank, at Çamlıyamaç in Uzundere, went up between 963 and 973 under Bagrat the magistros, with the architect Grigor of Öşk; its frescoes were painted in 1036, and twelve windows pierce the drum of its great dome. Also in Uzundere, Engüzek Castle, once the chief fortress of the Tortum valley, keeps walls thirty metres high.
Further north, İspir Castle rises on a rock above the Çoruh, with a ruined basilica and a nineteenth-century mosque built from its stones. Oltu Castle stands on a rocky hill in the middle of Oltu, the ruins of a Georgian church of St George inside, and in the town centre the Russian church of 1885–1890 has been restored. Narman district has fairy chimneys protected as a natural monument.
