Things to Do in Giresun: The Island, the Castle and the Highlands

--- title: "Giresun travel guide: the island, the castle hill, the village that talks in whistles, and a province split into two climates" description: "An honest guide to Giresun on Turkey's Black Sea coast: one of only two islands on the Turkish Black Sea shore, the castle hill above the town, the whistled language of Canakci on UNESCO's Urgent Safeguarding list, the highland pastures above Dereli, the coastal castles, and Sebinkarahisar behind the mountains. How many days, when to go, how wet it really is, what to eat." city: "Giresun" lang: "en" ---

Giresun: the town that may have given the cherry its name, the province that runs on hazelnuts

The ancient name of Giresun was Kerasous. It is related to the Greek word for cherry, and if you believe Pliny, the cherry reached Europe from here, carried west by Lucullus in Roman times. It is a good story. It is also not the only one. A competing reading traces the name to the Greek word for horn, describing the shape of the headland the town sits on, and reverses the direction of borrowing entirely: the fruit took its name from the town rather than the other way round. Nobody has settled this. Saying so is more useful than picking a side and sounding certain.

Modern Giresun does not run on cherries. It runs on hazelnuts, and that single fact shapes the land, the calendar and the conversation. The unbroken green climbing the slopes is not forest. It is orchard, planted, pruned and owned, running from the shoreline up to where the trees give out. In late August the entire province locks into the harvest, and you can feel it on the roads and in the markets.

The second thing to understand is geography. Giresun is not one place. It is two countries joined by a mountain. In the north there is the coastal strip: narrow, humid, clouded over, wet in every month of the year. In the south, beyond the range, sits Sebinkarahisar at an average altitude of 1,371 metres, dry, hard-wintered, and nothing at all like the coast. They share a licence plate and a provincial government, and between them lies a genuine mountain pass measured in hours. Keep that in mind, because "I'm going to Giresun" is not yet a plan.

Who is this for? Anyone avoiding crowds, anyone who likes small working harbour towns, anyone who wants to get up onto the summer pastures. Who is it not for? Anyone who needs guaranteed sun. On the eastern Black Sea, rain is not a season. It is the background condition. Packing an umbrella is not the adjustment. Planning around water is.

Quick answer

Giresun works as one day for the town and the island, one for the coastal towns, and a separate day for either the highlands or Sebinkarahisar. With a car. In the rain.

• The town: the castle hill and the market are walkable. Half a day.
• Giresun Island: reached by boat, about 1.6 km offshore. Sailings are seasonal, verify officially.
• The coast: castles and harbour towns from Bulancak east to Eynesil. One full day.
• The highlands: Bektas and Kumbet, up through Dereli. One full day.
• Sebinkarahisar: the other side of the mountain, a day in its own right. Possible as a day trip, but tight.
• Kuskoy: whistled language, up a valley in Canakci district.
• A car: required in practice. The coast road is good. Everything heading south is not.
• Food: hazelnuts, black cabbage, anchovies in winter, pide.

1. Giresun Island

A forty-thousand square metre rock sitting about 1.6 kilometres off the shore east of town. You will hear it called the only island in the eastern Black Sea. The claim needs trimming. What can actually be checked is this: it is one of two islands on Turkey's Black Sea shore, the other being Kefken Island off Kocaeli, far to the west. One of two in the whole country is a better line than the superlative, and it is true.

What makes the place interesting is not its size but what has accumulated on it. Ancient writers treat it as sacred to Ares and describe a temple of the Amazons here. Pliny mentions it as a temple site where the birds turned on strangers. In the Argonaut story, Jason's crew ran into aggressive birds on this rock. What survives above ground is walls, traces of a temple, and a standing stone called the Hamza Stone, reported to be around four thousand years old and associated with an earth goddess.

The island is a second-degree protected archaeological site. Seventy-one native plant species have been counted on it, and it works as a stopover and breeding ground for cormorants, gulls and migrating birds. Access is by boat from the harbour. Sailings and permissions shift with the season, so verify officially before you build a day around it.

2. Giresun Castle and the castle hill

It sits on the headland above the town, and you will see it from the centre without looking for it. Calibrate your expectations before you climb: there is no intact fortress up here. There are fragments of wall, and the hill itself now functions as a park. The town does not come here to admire masonry. It comes here to sit down, walk around and get some air.

You climb it for what is visible from the top. Giresun's plan only resolves from this height: the harbour and the market on one side, the shoreline running away on the other, the island offshore. From up here it is obvious in a single glance why the town is so long and so narrow. The mountain comes down almost to the water, and everything human had to fit in the gap. That is the whole story of this coast in one view.

The tomb of Topal Osman is on this hill. He lived from 1884 to 1923, a militia commander of the independence-war period, and he remains a contested figure about whom people still argue sharply. His grave is here and it is visited. Whatever you make of him, he is part of Giresun's recent history, and a guide that leaves him out is describing a town that does not exist.

The slope is steep. You can walk it, or you can drive up.

3. Giresun Museum (Gogora Church)

Come down off the castle and you are in the Zeytinlik quarter, which is where the museum is. The building had several lives before this one. It was built in the middle of the eighteenth century by the Greek Orthodox community as the Gogora Church, in rectangular yellow and brown limestone joined with iron hooks and lead. It was abandoned in 1923, used as a prison from 1948 to 1967, and became a museum in 1988. Buildings change jobs all over Anatolia. What is unusual here is being able to read the whole sequence off one facade.

The quarter earns as much attention as the building. Zeytinlik was established in the mid-nineteenth century by hazelnut merchants trading with Europe, and it was registered as a protected heritage site in 1991. Inside roughly 13.86 hectares there are 85 registered structures: 4 monumental and 81 examples of civil architecture, mostly two storeys, stone and timber mixed. Put the map away and walk uphill. The quarter is small and it runs into the castle anyway.

One note: I could only confirm the museum's coordinate from a single source, so the map pin is approximate at building scale. Ask when you reach the street. Verify opening hours officially.

4. Semsettin Mosque, Bulancak

Twenty kilometres west of the centre you come into Bulancak. The town's market is wedged between the coast road and the mountain, and this mosque stands inside it. It is one of the oldest surviving places of worship in the district.

Let me be direct: nobody comes here for the architecture. The building is modest. What earns Bulancak a stop is that it is a working town rather than a display one. Hazelnut buying points, tea houses, fish stalls, a real morning crowd. Nobody is selling you anything. It is one of the places drivers blow past at ninety on the coast road, which is precisely the argument for stopping.

Treat the mosque as a point on a walk through the market rather than a destination. The surrounding streets are where the district does its shopping, and half an hour there tells you more about how this coast functions than any viewpoint will.

If you go in, mind the prayer times, keep quiet, and women should cover their hair. Whether it is open at any given hour can vary. Verify officially.

5. Bektas Yaylasi

A highland settlement on the western branch of the road climbing south out of Dereli, built on open grass ridges above the tree line. Around forty-five kilometres from Giresun town, but do not read that number the way you would read it on a map. The road climbs through a valley, and the time it takes bears no relationship to the distance.

The view here comes from the absence of trees. You spend an hour inside the closed, dripping green of the coastal slope, and then the cover simply stops and you are out on open ridges. In summer the grass is full of flowers, animals are grazing, and some of the houses fill and empty with the season. This is not a resort. It is a pasture still used as a pasture.

The honest note: fog here is not a possibility, it is a habit. A ridge that is clear at seven can be shut in by noon, and some days you will not see twenty metres. That needs to be in the plan rather than in the disappointment. If you came for the view, start early and do not stake it on a single day.

The road is paved but narrow, and it closes in winter. Outside high summer, check road conditions before you commit.

6. Kumbet Yaylasi

South of Dereli and east of Bektas, this is the highland village best known for its summer festivals, and it is one of the most visible expressions of Giresun's pasture culture. The festivals occupy a real place in the local calendar rather than a tourist one. I am not printing dates, because they move from year to year. Verify officially.

Kumbet is reached by road, and the drive is easier than the run up to Bektas. The character is different too. There are trees here, the ridge is not stripped bare, and pine and grassland run into each other. Doing both in one day is possible, but do not underestimate the road between them.

A word about the pin. The coordinate in this guide was reverified against OpenStreetMap and Wikidata because the one we started from was rounded and roughly four kilometres off. I flag it because the pin on your phone for a Black Sea yayla is very often wrong, and up here that matters more than it does in a city. Turn up the wrong valley and getting out costs you half a day of daylight you did not budget.

Outside summer the road may be closed.

7. Andoz Castle

In Espiye district, a tower and stretches of wall on a rock spur overlooking the Yaglidere valley. You turn inland off the coast road and head south, and after a few kilometres it appears above the valley.

It is one of three castles around Tirebolu, along with Bedrama and Tirebolu's own. Taken together they explain why this coast is so thoroughly walled. This was the western frontier of the Empire of Trebizond, and it operated as a real frontier for a long time. The valleys run north to south, movement along the coast runs east to west, and every junction between the two got a fortress on top of it.

Keep expectations measured on the ruin itself. The walls are partial, and there is no laid-out visitor route inside. You are here for the position rather than the building. Stand on the spur, look down the valley, and the siting stops needing an explanation.

The approach road is narrow and the last stretch is on foot. After rain the ground gets slick.

8. Tirebolu Castle (Sen Jan)

Just east of the Tirebolu market, planted on a rock headland running out into the sea. It is also known as Sen Jan, Saint John's Castle. It is the most photogenic structure in the province and it has earned that: it reads less like a building on a rock than like a continuation of the rock, with the swell breaking at the base of the stone.

Be careful with the dating. Turkish-language sources circulating online contradict each other on when it was built, including at least one date that cannot possibly be right, so do not trust the confident number you find on the first page of results. What is solid is the fabric: a single gate, walls strengthened at intervals by buttress towers, artillery towers on the seaward front, and Ottoman-era gravestones inside that were moved here from a nearby school cemetery.

The ancient name of Tirebolu was Tripolis, meaning three cities. Where that came from is also disputed. It may refer to three headlands nearby, or to three fortresses. Both readings make sense and neither is proven, which is roughly the standard condition of everything on this coast older than the Ottomans.

The climb is short but the last section is rocky. On windy days, and there are many, stay back from the edge.

9. Tirebolu town and harbour

Do not see the castle and drive on. Tirebolu is a small harbour town squeezed between two bays, and it is one of the most coherent settlements on the Giresun coast. It sits on the site of ancient Tripolis, which means people have been making this exact judgement about this exact spot for a very long time.

Walk it. The market is small, the sea shows up at the end of every street, and the fish stalls are real. Most of the people sitting over tea on the front are not visitors. They live here. That is the difference between a harbour town and a harbour-town-shaped attraction, and you can feel it within about ten minutes.

Tirebolu's other thread is the hazelnut. Like the rest of the province, the economy runs on it, and the harbour's history is tied up in shipping it out. Arrive in late August and the town's rhythm has changed, the whole place organised around getting the crop in and moved.

I am not naming restaurants and I am not going to. Stop at a fish stall and ask what came in. The answer changes with the season, and the right answer is already standing in front of you.

10. Eynesil Castle

At the far eastern edge of the province near the Trabzon border, a small castle ruin sitting directly beside the coast road. Being on the road is both the appeal and the problem: it costs you nothing to reach, and the traffic runs past its foot.

This is not a place to build a day around, and I would rather say that than inflate it. If you are heading east along the coast it is a fifteen-minute stop. If you are continuing to Sis Dagi or on into Trabzon, it is on your line anyway.

Its meaning is not in itself but in the sequence. Andoz, Tirebolu, Bedrama, Eynesil: a chain of positions along the coast, within sight of each other or at least within reach of a signal. This was the western flank of the Empire of Trebizond, and it held. When Mehmed II took Trebizond in 1461, the whole chain changed hands with the capital. Standing at the last link and knowing that is worth more than the masonry in front of you.

The ruin is modest. You come for the logic of the coast, not the walls.

11. Kuskoy

A village up a valley in Canakci district. You do not come here for a view. You come for a sound. Kuskoy is where the tradition of whistled speech is still alive: words converted into whistles and thrown from one side of the valley to the other. Turkish Wikipedia puts the practice at around three centuries old and says roughly half the village still uses it.

Let me settle the UNESCO question, because it gets written up wrong constantly. According to UNESCO's own record, the element titled "Whistled language", submitted by Türkiye, was inscribed in 2017 at the twelfth session of the Intergovernmental Committee on the List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding. Not the Representative List. The distinction matters because the name of the list is a statement about the condition of the practice. One more correction: UNESCO's page does not name Kuskoy or Giresun. It defines the element nationally. Kuskoy is the tradition's best-known centre, but "Kuskoy is on the UNESCO list" is not quite what the record says.

Why urgent? Mobile phones. Once shouting across a valley in whistles stops being the fastest way to reach someone, the practice loses the job it was built for. The village had 656 people in 2000 and 374 in 2021, which is the same story told with a different instrument.

There is no guarantee you will hear whistling. It is not a show.

12. Sis Dagi

A highland ridge and summit between Canakci and the Trabzon border. Its name means fog mountain, and that is not a slogan, it is a description written by people who live under it. Take the name as data.

On a clear day the views from the pasture are long. The ridges are soft, grassland runs above the tree line, and distant ranges show themselves. But a clear day is rare here, and you should turn up prepared to spend your visit inside cloud. That is also an experience, with the grass going in and out of view and sound flattening out to nothing. It is simply not the experience the photographs sold you.

It sits in the same valley system as Kuskoy, so pairing them makes obvious sense. If you have turned off for Canakci, you are already halfway.

There are summer festivals up on the Sis Dagi pasture. The dates move from year to year. Verify officially before you plan around one.

The road is narrow and closes in winter, and driving it in fog demands attention. Lights on, speed down. That reads like generic advice, but here it is the actual local requirement, and the drop off the side of the road is not theoretical.

13. Sebinkarahisar Castle

This is the most dramatic structure in the province and the furthest from the coast. It stands south of the district town on the rock mass called Hacikayasi. The town itself averages 1,371 metres of altitude. The castle is above that.

What you notice up there is not the walls but the system cut into the rock: water cisterns at a range of sizes, building remains, and a large cistern known as the "kirk badal", the forty steps. This is not architectural display. It is siege arithmetic. A castle that can hold its own water holds out. A castle that cannot, does not, and everything else about the design follows from that single constraint.

The history is layered and the sources do not agree on where it begins. Persian, Pontic and Roman periods; Byzantine control from 591; Arab raids from 645; Umayyad conquest in 778; the Danishmends and Mengujekids in 1074; Seljuk control in 1128; Ottoman conquest in 1473 after the battle of Otlukbeli. The last restoration was in 2003. The settlement's ancient name was Koloneia, confirmed by a Greek inscription of the ninth or tenth century found in the castle itself.

One warning, and it is practical. Most maps put this castle in the wrong place, dropping the pin down in the town. The castle is south of the town, and above it.

14. Fatih Mosque, Sebinkarahisar

It stands in the market below the castle road, and its name can mislead you, so here are the dates plainly. The mosque was built following Mehmed the Conqueror's visit on 29 August 1473. But the building in front of you is not that building. The original wooden structure burned down twice, and what stands today dates from 1888, put up under the administration of Mutasarrif Resih Pasa. It was repaired again after earthquake damage in 1950.

So if you come here to see the fifteenth century, you will be disappointed. If you come to see a late nineteenth century Anatolian town mosque, you will find exactly that, and it is worth ten minutes because it is still doing its job rather than being preserved as an exhibit.

Look around the market while you are there. The Tashanlar are here, two-storey stone structures built in the seventeenth century by Taban Ahmet Aga, the Sipahi Reis. They served as a marketplace, then as a jail from 1915 until the 1939 earthquake, which damaged them severely. Read the mosque and the hans together and Sebinkarahisar starts to make sense as a town rather than a viewpoint.

If you go in, mind the prayer times.

15. Sebinkarahisar Ataturk House Museum

Ataturk came to Sebinkarahisar on 11 October 1924 and spent one night in this house. After restoration it opened as a museum on 11 October 1982, on the anniversary of the visit. The matching dates are not a coincidence, and that kind of deliberateness tells you something about how the republic handled its own memory.

Inside there are personal items he used, period artefacts, a library of five hundred books, and a portrait corner. It is a small museum, and it is better for being small. Half an hour covers it, and nothing has been inflated to fill space.

The value here is not the collection, it is the context. Sebinkarahisar is behind a mountain, hard to reach, and hard in winter. That the head of state, in the first year of the republic, made the journey out here and stayed the night says a good deal about what governing Anatolia meant in practice at that moment. The house itself is a modest provincial residence, not a palace, and that also is part of the point.

Opening hours can change. Verify officially. It links naturally with the castle and the market, all three sitting close together.

16. Meryem Ana Monastery

About eleven kilometres east of Sebinkarahisar, at the Kayadibi locality of Sariyer village. It is the most surprising structure in the province and among the least visited.

The monastery was not built. It was excavated. A single natural rock mass was hollowed out into a four-storey structure: the top level is the church, and the other levels hold thirty-two rooms for various functions. Traces of decorative painting survive on the walls. Turkish Wikipedia describes it as the second largest natural and rock-cut monastery in Turkey after Sumela, which is the comparison everyone reaches for and, for once, is not absurd.

Be cautious with the dating. The same source traces the foundations to the second century and the structure's development to the medieval period, but those dates are not independently confirmed. Read them with reservation rather than repeating them as settled fact.

Access is a serious matter and not a formality. The 1939 earthquake made the descent and entry substantially harder, and that is still the situation. This is not a managed site with railings, a ticket desk and a marked path. Ask locally about current access before you go, and do not start scrambling on the rock alone because you drove a long way and want the photograph.

Getting there

Giresun has no airport of its own. The two nearest are Ordu-Giresun Airport and Trabzon Airport. Ordu-Giresun sits west of the province beyond Bulancak, and despite the name it is not close to the town centre. Trabzon works as an approach from the east. Both connect along the coast road.

The coast road is good. The eastern Black Sea highway runs the full width of the province, and everything from Bulancak to Eynesil hangs off it. This is the easy part of Giresun, and doing only this part still makes a trip.

Every road turning south is a different proposition. The routes through Dereli to the highlands and on to Sebinkarahisar are mountain roads: narrow, switchbacked, closable in winter. Do not trust the drive times your map gives you. Add to them. Sebinkarahisar is a long way from the coast with a genuine pass in between, so structure that day around the driving rather than the arrival.

A car is required in practice. Buses reach the district towns, but the pastures, the castles and Kuskoy are not a reasonable public transport plan. If you will not drive, stick to the town, the island and the coastal towns, which is not a bad trip at all.

When to go

Start with the rain, because rain is what will shape your visit. On the eastern Black Sea coast, precipitation is spread across every month of the year, and Giresun is counted among the cloudiest places in Turkey. There is no rainy season here for the same reason there is no dry one. Take that as information rather than a warning: the green you came for is the rain's work.

Summer is the only sensible window for the highlands. From late June to early September the roads to Bektas, Kumbet and Sis Dagi are open and the festivals fall in this stretch. Summer is also when the coast is busiest, though by Turkish standards Giresun's version of busy is not busy.

Spring and autumn suit the coast and Sebinkarahisar. May and June are when the green is at full strength. September and October are quiet, cool and post-harvest, and if you want the province behaving normally, those two months are the honest choice.

The Aksu Festival falls on 20 May. It is a local tradition tied to Giresun Island, and accounts describe rituals including passing beneath the supports of the Hamza Stone. Both the date and the programme can shift year to year, so verify before you travel for it.

Winter is mild and wet on the coast and hard in Sebinkarahisar. The province runs two different winters at once, and the mountain roads close. Between December and March snow can reach the shoreline.

What to eat

The hazelnut is not a snack here, it is an economy. Giresun hazelnuts are named for the place, they sit at the centre of the province's agriculture, and they turn up throughout the kitchen from desserts to soups. Come in late August and you see the harvest itself rather than the product.

Black cabbage, karalahana, is the basic green of the Black Sea and Giresun is no exception. It appears as soup, as stuffed rolls, as a fry-up, and every household has its own method, taken more seriously than an outsider expects. It is said to be better in winter, sweetened by frost, which is both folk wisdom and plant physiology.

Anchovies, hamsi, are seasonal, and the season is winter. The visitor asking for hamsi in July is a Black Sea classic. If you are here in summer, ask what came in that morning, and the answer will not be hamsi.

Pide is everywhere and the Black Sea version has its own form. As for cherries: the town's name is bound up with them, but Giresun today is not a cherry centre. Do not come for the fruit. Come for the etymology, and eat the hazelnuts.

I am not naming places. Wherever the market traders are eating lunch is usually right.

Frequently asked questions

**How many days do you need in Giresun?**

Two days covers the town, the island and the coastal towns: day one for the castle hill, the market and the island, day two for the coast road from Bulancak east to Eynesil with Andoz and Tirebolu on it. A third day goes to either the highlands or to Canakci. Sebinkarahisar needs a fourth, because it is behind the mountain and the drive alone eats half a day. The people compressing all of this into three days spend those three days in the car.

**Is Kuskoy's whistled language really on the UNESCO list?**

Yes, but the wording matters. UNESCO's record shows the element titled "Whistled language", submitted by Türkiye, inscribed in 2017 at the twelfth Committee session on the List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding. That is not the Representative List. It is the urgent safeguarding list, which is a statement about how much trouble the practice is in. UNESCO's page also does not name Kuskoy or Giresun, defining the element at national level. Kuskoy is the tradition's most prominent centre, but "Kuskoy is UNESCO-listed" is technically an incomplete sentence.

**Is Giresun Island really the only island in the eastern Black Sea?**

That sentence needs adjusting. What is verifiable is that it is one of two islands on Turkey's Black Sea shore, the other being Kefken Island off Kocaeli. Since Kefken is in the west, there is no other island on the eastern stretch, but superlatives that depend on where you draw the line are worth less than they sound. One of two in the country is a safer claim and interesting enough on its own.

**How do you get to Giresun Island?**

By boat from the harbour. The island is about 1.6 kilometres offshore and it is not a swim. Sailings depend on the season, and because the island is a second-degree protected archaeological site, visiting conditions can change. I am not printing departure times or prices, because anything I printed would be wrong by the time you read it. Check with the harbour or an official source first.

**How seriously should I take the rain in Giresun?**

Very. Rain here is the default rather than a risk, and it is spread across every month; Giresun is counted among the cloudiest places in Turkey. Bring a waterproof jacket, because an umbrella loses to the wind. Waterproof footwear makes a real difference on the castle path and on the pastures. But here is the other half of the advice: if you wait for a dry forecast, you will never come. The working strategy on this coast is not avoiding the rain. It is agreeing to walk around in it.