Namrun Castle stands in the Çamlıyayla district of Mersin, in the Taurus mountains, commanding the way to Tarsus and the Cilician Gates. Because its general character points to an earlier date it is said to have been the Assyrian fortress called Illubru. In the Middle Ages, when it formed part of the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia, the castle was known as Lampron and was the ancestral seat of the Armenian Hethumid princes.
The Byzantine emperor Constantine IX Monomachos gave authority over Tarsus and its region to an Armenian noble named Ablgharib, who was also appointed governor of Cilicia; he encouraged other Armenian families to settle in the region and was buried at Paperon castle when he died.
In the third quarter of the eleventh century the Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos granted the government and revenues of the Namrun region as a fief to Ōšin son of Hetum, one of the Armenian nobles who first settled this Byzantine holding, along with the title of Sebastokrator, a high honorific of the Byzantine empire. After the castle was repaired and strengthened it became an almost impregnable base of the Hethumid dynasty.
During the First Crusade in 1097 Baldwin reached Tarsus by way of Namrun Castle. When Tarsus passed to the crusaders, Sis became the capital of the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia. Ōšin, who helped the crusaders and kept good relations with them, gave up to their control all the places he held apart from Namrun. The small Armenian principalities of the region, which had been fighting one another constantly over succession, came to terms and united during the crusader advance, and the Hethumid house founded by Ōšin was attached to the Rubenids.
After several failed attempts at siege in 1171, 1176 and 1182, the castle was taken at the beginning of the thirteenth century by King Levon I of the Rubenid house through a stratagem: he married his niece to one of the Hethumid nobles, and while everyone was at the wedding feast at Tarsus his army seized the castle.
In the early 1240s the castle became the centre of a serious revolt against the Armenian king when Constantine, baron of Namrun, joined the Seljuk sultan Gıyâseddin Keyhüsrev II and attacked King Hetum I. The counter-attack that ended the revolt was led by the constable Smbat, baron of Papeřōn; Constantine was captured and executed for treason in 1250. In 1309–10 the castle served for a short time as the prison of Henry II, the Lusignan king of Cyprus.
What the castle is made of and where it stands explain why it held out so long. Like many castles in the mountainous part of the old Armenian kingdom of Cilicia, Namrun was built on a limestone spur projecting from the southern end of the Bolkar mountains. It sits at the meeting of three high valleys, in a position from which the converging roads could be controlled, and it has a line of sight to Sinap castle three kilometres to the northeast. The site measures roughly 330 by 150 metres, with a drop of more than fifty metres to the valley below, and at its northwestern end a dry ditch was cut to separate the castle from the rest of the spur.
Inside, the plan divides in two. On the south and west is a small, narrow lower courtyard; above it a large upper courtyard reached only by stairs cut into the rock and a narrow turning entrance passage. Along the south and east sides of the upper courtyard lie the collapsed remains of a great many buildings, the foundations of many of them cut straight into the rock. At the north end are six fine vaulted chambers, two of them fitted with loopholes and gun emplacements; the six adjoining rooms are built of carefully cut ashlar. Below the lower courtyard, to the southwest, is a small medieval bath. Excavation of its remains showed five sections in all: three spaces running east to west, with two more adjoining them on the north, and a hypocaust underneath serving as the heating system.
The Armenian period ended in stages. In Baybars's time the Mamluks campaigned five times against the Cilician Armenian kingdom centred on Sis, in 1261, 1266, 1273, 1275 and 1276, and with their last campaign, in 1375, they brought Armenian rule to an end altogether. Namrun and the country around it came afterwards under the Karamanids and then the Ottomans.
When to go
- Climate
- Across Mersin as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from 10.4 °C in January to 28.5 °C in August; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in April, May, October and November; rainfall is heaviest in December (137 mm) and lightest in August (7 mm). Long-term means for 1929-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
