Ağzıkaraca Castle

Ağzıkaraca Castle, locally known as Ağzıkaraca Kalesi, lies on a flat hill northwest of the hamlet of the same name, in the province of Adana in Turkey.

The castle is situated in a region called Cilicia, which was the area of an Armenian kingdom between the end of the 11th century until the late 14th century. As with most of the fortifications in this area, neither its medieval name nor its history are known.

I was not able to find any information about Ağzıkaraca Castle, other than that it might date back to Late Roman or Early Byzantine times. So that would place its construction somewhere around the 4th or 5th century. Its location and remaining architecture indeed indicate no Armenian origins. The site does have intervisibility with Sis Castle.

Within the castle were found many shards of ceramics, traces of former structures and cisterns and graves cut out of the rock. It is said that in the past, locals carried off most of the stonework to be used for construction of their own dwellings.

What remains at present is most of the foundation of the circuit walls and a couple of standing parts of those circuit walls. All over the plateau are several circular holes cut into the bedrock which seem to have had a kind of lid on them. I don't know if these were used as cisterns or as the aforementioned graves. The abundant vegetation obscures some of them, so be careful when walking around.

At present Ağzıkaraca Castle can freely be visited. To get there will only require some field walking but the crops and plants surrounding the hill were over a meter high when I visited. Not a very interesting site.

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