Kalepark (originally called Leonkastron; and later Güzelhisar, meaning "Beautiful Castle" in Turkish) was procured and further fortified by Genoese merchants as a medieval fortress on the east side of Trabzon, Turkey. The fortress was built on a rocky outcrop strategically overlooking both harbors of the city: the summer harbor at a distance to the west, and the winter harbor just to the east of it. A few hundred meters to the west of Leonkastron lay the "Venetian Castle", which was a competing fortified trading outpost. In the following centuries many other Europeans settled on the streets between these forts - such as traders from Lviv in Ukraine - and it thus became known as the "European quarter".
In the 1740s, a palace was built for the Ottoman Governor Ahmet Paşa at the same location, which was destroyed by a fire in 1790.
The castle was frequently shelled during World War I by the Russian naval forces, due to its easily accessible location near the Black Sea coast.
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Kalepark as depicted in Kéraban the Inflexible by Jules Verne.
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The Kalepark featured prominently in the 1895 Illustrated London News.
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The Kalepark in ruins. Drawn by Eugène Flandin.
Notes and references
- Trabzon soul(Tr) Archived 2011-10-16 at the Wayback Machine
- Ganita(Tr) Archived 2011-10-04 at the Wayback Machine
External links
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