Sinop Historical Prison

Sinop Historical Prison occupies the inner courtyard of the fortress: two-storey blocks of dressed stone are built directly into the ring of the ancient walls. The building went up in 1887 and for almost a hundred and ten years, until 1997, it worked as a high-security prison, until the inmates were moved to a new block outside the town. The sea on three sides and the blank fortress wall on the fourth made escape an almost hopeless business, which is how the place earned its grim fame. Both criminal and political prisoners were sent here: at different times the writers Sabahattin Ali and Refik Halid Karay and the poet Nazim Hikmet were held here, and almost every one of them later described these walls. In 1999 the prison was handed over to the Ministry of Culture and opened as a museum - the cells, workshops, punishment cells and exercise yards were left as they were, with explanatory panels and a few restored interiors added. From the fortress wall the complex is visible in full: rows of barred windows, red tiles, the trampled grass of the yards and rusted barbed wire on top of the fences. Because of its bleak reputation the prison has long been nicknamed the Turkish Alcatraz, and the nickname has stuck to it in guidebooks.

Address

Çalıkuşu Sk., Sinop

On the map