Yoros stands on the Anatolian side of the Bosphorus, on the eastern flank of its Black Sea mouth, and was built with the İmros castle opposite at Rumeli Kavağı to control the entrance to the strait between them. It is also called Anadolukavağı Kalesi, or the Genoese castle — a name the district governorate says is simply wrong. A Greek inscription in brick letters on one of its towers shows it to be Byzantine work. Where the name came from is less settled: the common view derives it from Hieron, holy place, though the governorate notes it may just as well come from oros, mountain, and thinks that reading may be the better one.
It changed hands repeatedly. The Turks took it along with Şile in 1305 but could not hold it long. From 1348 it was held by the Genoese, who controlled the Black Sea trade route; an inscription copied from above the castle gate, recorded in a book of 1831, states that the Genoese Vincenzo Lercari had the castle on the holy cape repaired, though its date could not be read. By the end of the fourteenth century the Ottomans, who by then held the whole Anatolian shore, had taken it back.
Bayezid I made it a base. Âşıkpaşazâde records that in 1391 he came overland from Kocaeli with a substantial force and landed at Yoros, sending Yahşi Bey on from here to take Şile; he then built Anadolu Hisarı, which is counted among the most important steps in the preparations for taking Constantinople. In the woods near the castle is a cemetery holding the graves of those killed in its capture. In 1399 Marshal Boucicaut, raiding the mouth of the Black Sea, did not dare attack Yoros and managed only to burn the village below it before withdrawing. Ruy González de Clavijo, sent to Timur as the ambassador of the king of Spain, saw the castle on his way out to the Black Sea, called it El Guirol de la Turquia, and reported it well kept with a Turkish garrison inside, while the castle opposite lay ruined and abandoned. He also passed on a rumour that a chain had once been stretched from here to a tower on the far shore — though nobody had seen it.
After the conquest of Constantinople the castle was repaired by Bayezid II, who built a prayer room inside it known as the Yoros Castle mescid; a later castle warden, Mehmed Ağa, added a bath. An Ottoman archive document of 1576 records the castle repaired together with its mosque, fountain and bath. The German traveller M. Heberer of Bretten found it in good condition around 1580 and included a fairly accurate engraving of it in his account. The Armenian writer P. Ğ. İnciciyan reports that at the end of the eighteenth and start of the nineteenth century there was a Turkish quarter of 25 houses inside the castle, with a detachment of twenty men under a warden. Excavation and restoration have been under way since 2010, directed by Prof. Asnu Bilban Yalçın of Istanbul University.
When to go
- Climate
- Across İstanbul as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from 6.8 °C in January to 24.7 °C in August; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in May, June, July, August, September and October; rainfall is heaviest in December (99 mm) and lightest in July (22 mm). Long-term means for 1950-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
