Ciha Castle

About this place

An irregular ring of stone barely thirty metres across, perched on a 350-metre hill, has been watching the road up from the coast into the Hemşin valley for six centuries or more. This is Ciha Castle, and the name is simply the Laz word for 'castle': when the linguist Nikolay Marr climbed up in 1910, the villagers of Lamğo, today's Yücehisar, had no other name for it, and in 1959 the village itself was renamed after the fortress on its hill. There is no ticket booth, no attendant and little in the way of signage: it is you, the ruin and the view. What survives earns the stop despite its size. The walls are roughly 1.2 to 1.8 metres thick and still stand six or seven metres high at their best, on the north-eastern side, where a gate barely a metre and a half wide, flanked by two semicircular towers, leads into the enclosure; inside, clearance work by the Rize Museum in 2020-21 exposed a small single-nave chapel. Who built it is an open question. Older local accounts credit Genoese traders in the 14th century with a signalling and lookout post, but a 2023 academic study reads it as a Byzantine-era outpost most likely raised between the 11th and 14th centuries: the pottery turned up by the excavation dates from the 10th to 13th centuries, and a carved slab in the chapel, with peacocks around a cross, is older still, probably reused from an earlier building. The one certainty is that the site was chosen for its eyes rather than its looks: from the walls the green Hemşin valley opens towards the Black Sea, and that is both the price of the climb and its reward. Getting there is straightforward by car: about 37 km east of Rize along the coastal highway to the town of Pazar (roughly 40 minutes), then some 8 km up the Hemşin valley on the east side of the river to Yücehisar, so allow about an hour from Rize. From the village road it is a short uphill walk on an unmade path that turns to mud after rain, and rain is a permanent guest here. Pushchairs and toddlers have no place on the climb; children who can manage fifteen minutes uphill without complaint will enjoy the idea of a castle on a mountain more than the ruins themselves. The Rize Museum cleared the site and consolidated the walls in 2020-21, so it is tidier than it was, but it remains an unstaffed ruin, not a fitted-out monument. Ciha is not a destination in its own right but a half-hour stop between the coast and the Hemşin highlands, or a short detour if you are heading to Ayder by the inland road. In August, when the coast swelters, the summit breeze is worth the effort; in winter the path becomes mud that tempts nobody. If time is short, Zilkale in the Fırtına valley is bigger, prettier and far better known. If you are passing anyway and like places that have not yet been arranged for tourists, give it half an hour.