Edirne is a city built on layers of history that most travelers only glimpse. It began as a Roman city on the road to the Balkans, became the capital of the Ottoman Empire at the height of its early expansion, and ended the twentieth century as a quiet border city that still carries the marks of every age. Its mosques are among the greatest in the world, its festival claims six centuries of continuity, and its position at the meeting of rivers and borders has shaped everything about it. This guide tells the city’s story.
The Meeting of Rivers
Edirne stands where the Tunca and the Meric rivers meet, in the fertile plain of Thrace, close to the borders of modern Greece and Bulgaria. The rivers gave the site its first importance: a crossing point on the great land route between Europe and Asia.
The plain around the city is some of the richest farmland in the Balkans, and the rivers supplied water, fish and defense. Any power that controlled the crossing controlled the road to Constantinople, which made this spot a prize for two thousand years.
The rivers still define the city. The old town sits on the ridge between them, the meadows on their banks host the great festival, and the bridges, built over the centuries, are among the most beautiful structures in the city.
Hadrian’s City: Adrianople
The city began as a Roman foundation, established by the emperor Hadrian in the early second century on the site of an older Thracian settlement. It was named Hadrianopolis, the city of Hadrian, and it prospered as a station on the military road through Thrace.
In the Roman system, the city was a way station and a market for the surrounding plain, and it grew steadily. By the late fourth century it was a substantial provincial town, important enough to witness one of the great turning points of Roman history.
Nothing of the Roman city survives above ground, but the pattern of the streets and the position of the settlement on the ridge descend directly from Hadrian’s foundation. The modern city still lives on the Roman plan.
378: The Battle of Adrianople
In the summer of 378, the greatest battle of the late Roman world was fought near the city. The Goths, fleeing the Huns, had crossed the Danube, and the emperor Valens marched against them from Constantinople, meeting their camp near Adrianople.
The battle was a disaster for Rome. The Gothic cavalry broke the Roman army, Valens was killed, and two-thirds of the eastern field army was destroyed. It was the worst defeat of a Roman emperor on the battlefield in centuries.
Historians have long seen the battle as a turning point, the moment the Roman world began its slow transformation into the world of the Middle Ages. Adrianople was the stage, and the city has never forgotten its place in the story. The battle is still studied in military academies, and its name, etched into every account of the late Roman empire, is the city’s oldest claim on the memory of the world.
Byzantine Centuries and Crusader Roads
Under the Byzantines, Adrianople remained a fortress and a gateway, holding the road between Constantinople and the Balkans. It was besieged and burned repeatedly, by Avars, Bulgarians and others, and it was rebuilt each time by an empire that could not afford to lose it.
The city also stood on the route of the Crusades, and the armies of the First and the later Crusades passed through its gates on the march to the Holy Land. In the chaos of the Fourth Crusade, which sacked Constantinople in 1204, the region fell into the hands of competing powers.
By the fourteenth century the Byzantine Empire was shrinking, and Adrianople, weakened by war and plague, lay exposed. The Ottomans, advancing through the Balkans, were about to take the prize. The conquest of the city in 1361 gave the Ottomans their European capital and their base for the conquest of the Balkans, and it set the empire on the road that would lead to Constantinople itself.
The Ottoman Capital: 1361-1453
In 1361, the Ottoman sultan Murad I captured Adrianople, and the city, now called Edirne, became the capital of the rising Ottoman state. For nearly a century, from 1361 until the fall of Constantinople in 1453, Edirne was the heart of the empire.
The sultans built palaces, mosques and public buildings on a grand scale, and the city grew into one of the great capitals of the age. The Old Mosque and the Uc Serefeli were among the largest buildings of their day, and the Edirne Palace on the Tunca was the seat of power.
Mehmed the Conqueror was born in Edirne, and it was from here that the final assault on Constantinople was planned. When the city fell in 1453, the capital moved to the new imperial city, and Edirne began its long life as the second city of the empire.
Sinan and the Selimiye
After the capital moved to Istanbul, Edirne remained the empire’s second city, and in the sixteenth century it received the greatest monument of the Ottoman age. The sultan Selim II commissioned the architect Mimar Sinan to build a mosque that would crown the city.
The Selimiye, completed in 1575, is Sinan’s masterpiece and his own declared best work. Its dome, larger than that of Hagia Sophia, spans a single, light-filled space, and its four minarets are the tallest in Turkey. The building is the summit of Ottoman architecture.
The Selimiye made Edirne a destination for the whole empire, and it remains the symbol of the city today, a building that the UNESCO listing describes as a masterpiece of the Islamic world.
The Long Ottoman Centuries
For the three centuries after the Selimiye, Edirne lived as a great provincial capital on the European frontier of the empire. The sultans visited on campaigns, the city prospered on trade and agriculture, and the bazaar, the mosques and the hans filled with the life of a border city. The eighteenth-century traveler found a city of domes and caravans, where the merchants of the Balkans, the Aegean and the Black Sea all met and traded.
The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought wars and occupation. Russian armies entered the city during the wars with the Ottomans, and the empire’s decline left Edirne on a frontier that was increasingly contested. The city’s position, once its fortune, became its vulnerability.
Through it all, the city’s character held: a place of commerce, faith and hospitality, with a population of Turks, Greeks, Bulgarians, Armenians and Jews living side by side. That diversity would not survive the century that followed.
The Balkan Wars and the Modern Border
The Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 were the catastrophe that remade Edirne. The city was besieged and captured by Bulgarian forces in 1913, and the siege, which lasted months, brought the city to starvation before the Ottomans regained it the same year.
The borders of the region were then fixed by the peace treaties, and after the First World War the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 confirmed the Meric as the frontier between Turkey and Greece. Edirne became a border city in a way it had not been for centuries.
The old Ottoman world was gone. The wars, the occupations and the exchange of populations emptied the city of much of its Christian population, and Edirne began the twentieth century as a Turkish border city, smaller, poorer and quieter than the capital it had once been.
The Population Exchange and the New Century
The Lausanne settlement included a population exchange between Greece and Turkey, and Edirne felt it deeply. The Greek community of the city, which had been a part of its life for centuries, departed, and Muslim families from Greece arrived to take their place.
The twentieth century was hard on the city. The borders closed off the trade routes that had made it rich, the region remained on the edge of Europe, and the city turned inward. But the modern era brought new life: the university, the restorations and a growing awareness of the city’s extraordinary heritage. The careful restoration of the Selimiye and the synagogue, and the revival of the bazaar, have made the city once again a place that people travel to see.
Today Edirne is rediscovering its history. The Grand Synagogue has been restored, the palaces and the bridges are being conserved, and the festival of Kırkpinar, which never stopped, has made the city famous again as the keeper of a six-century tradition.
Living Culture: Kırkpinar, Food and Faith
The living culture of Edirne is a remarkable survival. The Kırkpinar oil wrestling festival, held each summer in the Sarici meadow, claims an unbroken tradition since the fourteenth century, making it the oldest continuously running sporting event in the world, and it is inscribed on UNESCO’s intangible heritage list.
The food culture is equally tenacious. The tava cigeri of the city, the fried liver that draws visitors from across Turkey, and the white cheese of the region are living traditions with centuries behind them, and the bazaar quarter still follows the rhythms of the old Ottoman market.
The faith of the city is written in its skyline, and the mosques remain the heart of the community, as they have been for six hundred years. Edirne is a city that has lost much and kept more, and its culture is the proof.
Frequently asked questions
Why was Edirne important in Ottoman history?
Edirne was the Ottoman capital from 1361 until 1453, the period when the empire rose from a Balkan power to a world empire. It was the seat of the sultans, the birthplace of Mehmed the Conqueror, and the home of the Selimiye, the masterpiece of Ottoman architecture, which makes it central to Ottoman history.
What happened to Edirne in the Balkan Wars?
The city was besieged and captured by Bulgarian forces in 1913, after a months-long siege that caused great suffering, and it was retaken by the Ottomans the same year. The wars and the peace treaties that followed redrew the borders and remade Edirne as a frontier city.
What is the Kırkpinar festival?
Kırkpinar is the annual oil wrestling festival of Edirne, held each summer in the Sarici meadow, with a tradition claimed to be more than six hundred years old. Wrestlers compete in oiled leather trousers, and the festival, inscribed on UNESCO’s intangible heritage list, is the oldest continuously running sporting event in the world.
All Over Information
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