İzmit Clock Tower

About this place

On the morning of 17 August 1999 thousands of buildings in İzmit came down in under a minute, and this slender stone tower on its hill above the railway station stayed up, escaping with broken decorative brackets under the eaves. Locals have looked at it as a witness rather than a monument ever since. It is 16.4 metres of Hereke and Kandıra stone, raised between 1900 and 1902 to mark twenty-five years of Sultan Abdülhamid II on the throne, to a design by the architect Vedat Tek that Mihran Azaryan executed with amendments of his own. The inscription on the west face credits the municipality with building «this tower with its fountain», and the three marble fountains are still there in the base, acanthus leaves and pearl beading carved round their elliptical basins. Let us be honest: this is a tower you see in a minute and understand in two. You cannot climb it, there is nothing to visit inside, and its worth lies in its trim neoclassical proportions and its setting rather than its size. The setting is what earns the trip. The tower stands in the park of the Kasr-ı Hümayun, the Baroque imperial lodge built under Sultan Abdülaziz that is now the Palace Museum, a few steps away. Do the museum first (3 EUR for foreigners, closed Monday, 09:00-17:30), then walk out to the tower, the garden and the view over the Gulf of İzmit; that turns a five-minute stop into a convincing hour. Kocaeli Metropolitan Municipality finished a full restoration in March 2026 after work that began in August 2025: the lead-clad roof was replaced, three tonnes of grout were injected into the masonry, the marble was cleaned and lost motifs recast from moulds, the fountains' water lines were reconnected and the stopped clock mechanism was overhauled, with new night lighting switched on that April. The bell is set to strike the hour count on the hour and once at the half hour; if you catch it while you are in the park, you are seeing the tower in its best condition for decades. From Sapanca it is about 40 km: roughly forty minutes by car on the D-100 or the TEM motorway, or around half an hour on the Ada Ekspresi regional train, which stops in Sapanca and drops you at İzmit station directly below the hill, which feels right for a clock tower that was hung over a railway station in the first place. The climb from the station is short but steep and stepped, so leave the pushchair. In August heat go in the morning; in winter İzmit is grey and damp rather than snowy like Sapanca. This is a stop for anyone already spending a day in İzmit, not a reason to make the journey on its own.