Guide
Enez Castle stands in the Enez district of Edirne, at the point where the Meriç river reaches the Aegean. It amounts to an open-air museum today and is used for festivals, exhibitions and similar events.
When the castle was built is not certain, but the reused building material in its walls points to a date before the Byzantine period, and it is thought to have been put up to hold off the raids coming from the Balkans. The Eastern Roman emperor Justinian is known to have ordered its repair in the sixth century, and the pointed Ottoman arches inside show that it remained in use in the Ottoman period.
The castle runs north-west to south-east and its main entrance is on the north-east. On the wall beside the monumental gate is a figure of a Thracian horseman in white marble. On the seaward side two walls run down from the castle to the water, guarding the harbour. Cut stone, brick and ancient architectural pieces were all used in the walls.
Within the castle is a church built as a basilica in the twelfth century and thought to have been turned into a mosque in 1455, along with a small cave used as a chapel whose floor is covered with rich mosaics. The reliefs on the cave walls showing mythological subjects were taken to the Edirne Museum.
The basilica is known as the Hagia Sophia of Enez, or the Fatih Mosque. It stands at the highest point, at the south-eastern end of the castle. Measuring 21 by 38 metres and built on a Greek cross plan, it was one of the large churches of its day, made with workmanship of the same high quality as its contemporaries in İstanbul. It holds wall paintings of both the Byzantine and the Ottoman periods.
Turned into a mosque in 1455, the building was brought down by the earthquake of 1965 and abandoned. Restoration and reconstruction begun in 2016 raised it again, and in 2021 it opened both for worship and for visitors.
Visit status for this record: open to visitors.
