Samsun

Samsun is a city on the north coast of Turkey with a population of around 1.4 million people. It is the provincial capital of Samsun Province and a major Black Sea port. The growing city has two universities, several hospitals, shopping malls, much light manufacturing industry, sports facilities and an opera.

Amisus, which stood on a promontory just northwest of the modern city centre, was founded in the 7th century BCE; after Sinope (modern Sinop) it was the most flourishing Milesian colony on the Euxine (Black) Sea. After Alexander the Great’s conquest of Asia Minor (Anatolia) in the 4th century BCE, Amisus came under the kings of Pontus and continued to prosper until it was burned down by its defenders when it was captured by the Romans in 71 BCE.

Known as Amisos under the Byzantines, it was renamed Samsun by the Seljuq Turks when they took it in the second half of the 12th century. Under Seljuq rule, it surpassed Sinope as a centre of trade between Europe and Central Asia; a large trading colony of Genoese was established there. Taken by the Ottoman sultan Bayezid I at the end of the 14th century, it reverted to the Turkmen Candar principality after the Ottoman defeat at the hands of the conqueror Timur (Tamerlane) in 1402. The city was burned by the Genoese before the Ottomans recaptured it in 1425. The landing of Mustafa Kemal (later called Atatürk) at Samsun on May 19, 1919, to organize national resistance marked the beginning of the Turkish War of Independence and heralded the establishment of the republic in 1923.