Alanya Citadel

Alanya Citadel crowns a rocky peninsula jutting into the Mediterranean above the modern resort city of Alanya. Its oldest section, the inner citadel or İçkale, dates back to the sixth century AD and was raised over earlier Roman and Byzantine fortifications. The bulk of the surviving walls, however, belong to a major building campaign carried out after 1221, when the Seljuk sultan Alaeddin Keykubad I captured the city and turned it into a naval base and winter capital, a project that also produced the city's famous Kızıl Kule, or Red Tower. The citadel's defensive circuit runs for several kilometres and is studded with roughly 140 towers. Inside the walls survive Seljuk cisterns, the ruined palace traditionally linked to Alaeddin Keykubad, the remains of a Seljuk bathhouse, and an eleventh-century Byzantine church. Under later Ottoman rule the site lost its purely military role, and villas were built within the walls during the nineteenth century. Today the citadel operates as an open-air museum.