Guide
When Bayburt Castle was first built, and by whom, is not known. It was repaired at various times, among them the reign of the Byzantine emperor Justinian I. The circuit is more than two kilometres round and the walls stand thirty metres high.
Bayburt was among the first places the Turks took in Anatolia, and the castle was fortified under the Seljuk dynasty and the Saltukids and Danishmendids. Its widest and most thorough repair came in the time of Tuğrul Şah, son of Kılıçarslan II and governor of Erzurum, against the threat that might come from the Empire of Trebizond.
The castle passed to the Ottomans in 1514 after the siege of Bayburt, and underwent important repairs in the reigns of Süleyman I and Murad III. Evliya Çelebi, who visited Bayburt in 1647, recorded that there was a quarter of three hundred households and a mosque within the castle. It was destroyed in the Russo-Turkish war of 1828–29.
