The Karahıdır Monument, also called the Karahızır Monument or the Four-Legged Monument, stands within the central district of Kırklareli, at the entrance to the village of Karahıdır — now a quarter — at the roadside. It was built in 1914, in the time of the governor İbrahim Süreyya Yiğit, in memory of Kocahıdır, who is said to have unhorsed Władysław III of Hungary at the Battle of Varna, cut off his head and set it on the point of his lance.
The monument is a brick dome carried on four marble columns; the columns and their capitals are said to be reused material. Muqarnas is used as ornament on the marble mouldings beneath the dome. The dome and its joints have been plastered with cement mortar and the missing pieces of the mouldings made up with it, and there is a hole fifty to sixty centimetres across in the top of the dome.
The ground the monument stands on is described as concrete-paved, though a photograph of 1999 in a brochure prepared by the Land Forces Command shows it resting on a stepped marble base. The municipality of Kırklareli laid out the surroundings as a park in 2012.
When to go
- Climate
- Across Kırklareli as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from 3 °C in January to 23.9 °C in July; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in May, June, July, August and September; rainfall is heaviest in December (70 mm) and lightest in August (21 mm). Long-term means for 1959-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
