What you climb to reach Afyonkarahisar Castle is not a hill but an extinct volcano: a single block of rock 226 metres above the streets of the city. It stands in the middle of Afyonkarahisar rather than outside it. The rock is the reason for everything built on top of it, and it is the reason the place kept being taken.
Its succession of names is the shortest history of the region anyone could ask for. To the Hittites, who fortified it around 1350 BC during Mursili II's campaign against Arzawa, it was Hapanuva. Rome and Byzantium knew it as Akroenos. The Seljuks called it Karahisar, the black fortress, and gave it two further names according to what it was being used for — Hisar-ı Devlet, the fortress of the state, because Sultan Alaeddin Keykubat I kept his treasury inside it, and Karahisar-ı Sahip after the vizier Sahip Ata Fahrettin Ali.
The name in use today was fixed in 1573 by Selim II, who had the castle repaired and added the word afyon — opium — for the crop grown on the plain below. The city takes its name from the fortress rather than the other way round, which is worth remembering while standing on the rock and looking down at the fields that supplied the second half of it.
When to go
- Climate
- Across Afyonkarahisar as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from 0.4 °C in January to 22.2 °C in August; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in May, June, July, August and September; rainfall is heaviest in May (56 mm) and lightest in August (14 mm). Long-term means for 1929-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
Visiting hours
- Hours
- 08:30 - 17:30, closed Monday
