The castle stands on the Dumanlı plateau above Kurtlar village in the Düziçi district of Osmaniye, three kilometres southwest of a village named in Abbasid inscriptions, on the old road to Maraş. It was built in 785 or 786 as one of the strategic points in the chain of Arab fortresses spread across the Nur mountains, known in Arabic as Jabal Lukkam.
It changed hands repeatedly. Al-Yaqut records that the Byzantines under Nikephoros Phokas captured 15,000 Muslims of Haruniye in 959; Sayf ad-Dawla had the war-damaged castle repaired in 967. By 1198 and 1199, and probably earlier under Baron Levon, it was held by the local Armenian kingdom, and after Levon a man named Godfrey became lord of Haruniye. On 22 July 1236 King Hetum I and his wife Zapel granted it to the Teutonic Knights for their services — though the provincial governorate notes that nothing in the archaeology of the castle shows any trace of the Teutonic Knights or their period. Haruniye passed to the Mamluks at the end of the thirteenth century, and in the middle of the fourteenth the Egyptians made it the administrative centre of eastern Cilicia.
What makes this castle unusual is its walling: three different masonry techniques were used here. The original fortress, which the present building still resembles, was built entirely of limestone and basalt, and some of the work recalls the technique at the Kum and Amuda castles. The governorate records no evidence of Armenian building technique.
The arrow slits are worth looking at closely. Those along the northwest wall all belong to the first phase of construction, cut in roughly dressed stone, and the governorate calls them among the finest examples of Arab military architecture: Byzantine slits are triangular, Arab ones rounded. One slit differs from the rest and was probably made in the repair of 967. Elsewhere there are two gates, the outer face of the main one badly damaged and its inner face collapsed; a tower of basalt beside the second gate, divided into floors by timber whose beam sockets survive, with a course of fine decorative limestone marking off the third storey and a lower level that may have been a cistern; vaulted living quarters, one with seven shielded slits; and a narrow private room. The second gate carries the only masons' marks found anywhere in the castle. The photographic survey also found a second circuit wall, unrecorded on the existing plan and unmentioned in the sources, running east to west on the north side and traceable to the south, surviving among the trees to about a metre high and a metre wide.
When to go
- Climate
- Across Osmaniye as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from 8.9 °C in January to 28.7 °C in August; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in April, May and October; rainfall is heaviest in March (116 mm) and lightest in August (10 mm). Long-term means for 1986-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
