Akkerman Fortress

When a fortress changes names this many times, the names become part of the story. Greeks knew the settlement as Tyras, Slavs as Bilhorod, Moldavians as Cetatea Albă, and Ottomans as Akkerman. Different empires came and went, but several arrived at essentially the same description: the White City. The name suited a stronghold built from pale limestone beside the Dniester Estuary, where walls eventually stretched nearly 2.5 kilometers around more than nine hectares.

Those walls took shape over centuries. By the 15th century, 34 towers guarded the complex, backed by a moat roughly 20 meters deep and 14 meters wide. Inside was something closer to a fortified city than a single castle, with separate spaces for soldiers, civilians, trade, and the heavily protected citadel at its core. Whoever controlled Akkerman controlled one of the region’s most valuable gateways between the Black Sea and the interior.

That made it worth fighting for. In 1484, Sultan Bayezid II and Crimean Khan Mengli Giray captured the fortress after a sixteen-day siege, beginning more than three centuries of Ottoman rule. Cossack forces repeatedly tried to take it back, but Akkerman remained an Ottoman stronghold until Russia acquired the region in 1812.

By 1832, advances in artillery had made its medieval defenses obsolete, and the fortress lost its military status. The armies disappeared, but the walls stayed behind, along with centuries of names, sieges, and one persistent legend: somewhere inside one of Akkerman’s towers, an Ottoman sultan’s treasure is supposedly still waiting to be found.