The Caucasus Front War History Museum occupies the Kanlı Tabya, a gun emplacement built to guard Kars from the south, restored and opened as a branch of the Kars Archaeological Museum. The emplacement went up in 1803, in the reign of Selim III, under the name of the New Emplacement; during the Russian attacks on Kars in 1828 every soldier in it was killed in a night raid, and from then on it was called the Kanlı Tabya, the bloody emplacement. It has come down with its architecture intact.
It is one of forty-six gun emplacements the Ottoman empire built in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the centre of Kars, a frontier city, for its defence. They matter historically as works raised to guard the eastern borders of the empire against Russian and Iranian attack, and Kars is the province holding the greatest number of such emplacements in the country.
These works saw important fighting against the Russian armies in the nineteenth century. They turned back the Russian attack of 1828, secured the victory at Kars in 1855, and were used again in the defensive battles of the Russo-Turkish war of 1877 and 1878. After the victory of 1855, also known as the battle of the emplacements, Sultan Abdülmecid had three thousand Kars medals struck and sent to the city.
The building stands on treasury land of 29,819 square metres allotted to the Ministry of Culture and Tourism; the general directorate of cultural heritage and museums let the restoration contract on 9 July 2012 to open it to visitors.
In the museum garden stands the White Carriage. It was presented to Kâzım Karabekir Pasha, commander of the Fifteenth Corps and the man who freed Kars, by the Russian generals who came to the city for the Treaty of Kars of 13 October 1921, and he used it as his private carriage between Kars and Erzurum during his years as corps commander.
When to go
- Climate
- Across Kars as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from -10.7 °C in January to 17.9 °C in August; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in July and August; rainfall is heaviest in May (83 mm) and lightest in January (23 mm). Long-term means for 1931-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
Visiting hours
- Hours
- 08:00 - 17:00, closed Monday
