Giresun lies on the eastern Black Sea coast, a town known in antiquity as Kerasos, with green valleys behind it climbing to summer pastures at over two thousand metres. Its best-known sight is the small island just off the shore, wrapped in more legend than its size suggests. Inland, across the mountains, Şebinkarahisar has a monastery built into a cliff and a weaving tradition with a geographical indication of its own.
Giresun Island
The island lies 1.6 kilometres out from the coast with an area of 40,000 square metres, and with Kefken it is one of just two islands in the Black Sea that belong to Türkiye. In summer, boats go out from Giresun harbour for day trips and picnics. Bay laurel and black locust cover much of it, and it is among the Black Sea sites where cormorants and gulls breed in the wild.
The ruins show that walls once ringed the island, built in the same technique as Giresun castle and probably of the Pontic period, with a watchtower, the remains of a shrine and a temple site, and two huge wine jars. By the account of historical sources, Amazon queens founded a temple of Ares here. In the Argonautica of Apollonius, the heroes sailing in the Argo for the Golden Fleece were attacked near the island of Ares by birds dropping feathers hard as iron; half of them rowed while the rest roofed the deck with their shields, then frightened the birds off with noise, as Herakles had done. In 1984 Tim Severin rowed a nail-free replica of the Argo to the island, and a BBC team filmed the voyage.
At the eastern tip stands the Hamza Stone, a stone set on three legs like a trivet and linked with the mother goddess Cybele. On 20 May every year, as part of the International Aksu Festival, people climb through it for the continuation of their family line and then walk right round the island, starting and finishing at the stone.
In town: the museum and the Castle Mosque
Giresun Museum occupies the Gogora Church in the Zeytinlik quarter, a basilica the Greek Orthodox community built in the middle of the eighteenth century. Abandoned in 1923 and used as a prison from 1948 to 1967, it opened as a museum in 1988. The collection runs from the Hellenistic to the Ottoman period, with terracotta figurines, amphorae and coins; the oldest piece dates to 3000 BC, and there are finds from Erik harbour and a nineteenth-century ethnographic section.
The Castle Mosque is a single-domed Ottoman building in cut stone, its doorway and mihrab carved in a baroque taste. An inscription records its rebuilding in 1830 by Dizdarzade Ematullah Hatun, and it took its present form in 1913.
Yedideğirmenler: seven mills
In Espiye district, 62 kilometres from Giresun, the nature park of Yedideğirmenler takes its name from its seven mills, six of which still grind for the three villages around them. The woods are mostly alder, with purple rhododendron on the shaded slopes, and brown bear, roe deer and golden eagle are among the animals recorded. There is a cave with stalactites, but only professionals may enter, and only after August, because its narrow passage runs with water.
The summer pastures of Dereli
Kümbet, fifty-two kilometres south of Giresun in Dereli district, is the best equipped of the high pastures, with shops, a hotel and a festival held every year on July's second Sunday. Going up through İkisu and down through Güdül gives the better views. Bektaş, at 2,100 metres, was named by the Turkmen Çepni after Hacı Bektaş Veli; it serves as the market of the pastures around it, has good walking routes, and holds its festival on 30 June and 1 July. It is cold enough up there to need a stove even in summer, and on clear days the clouds lie in the valleys below. People live on the pastures from April, when the snow melts, until about November; in winter the roads are blocked.
Şebinkarahisar: the cliff monastery and Tamzara cloth
Eleven kilometres to the east of Şebinkarahisar, at the village of Sarıyer, the monastery of the Virgin fills a great hollow in a sheer cliff, which is why it is compared to Sümela. Its origins are Byzantine but what stands now was rebuilt in the nineteenth century: thirty-two rooms with painted walls, student cells on a second level and, at the top, a church cut into the rock. It was restored in 2013 and 2014 and opened to visitors.
Tamzara, a quarter of Şebinkarahisar with restored houses, has woven its cotton cloth by hand since the eighteenth century and once sent it by caravan to Egypt and Syria. A cooperative was founded to make it under a decree signed by Atatürk in 1937; a geographical indication followed in 2019. Today it is made into shirts, shawls, scarves and tablecloths.
Each of these places has its own guide on this site with directions and visiting details.
