A Town Called Visa Population: 15,100
Old name: Bizye/Bizya, Uzusa
Driving to Kıyıköy on the Black Sea coast of Trakya (Thrace) you might want to stop off in the small town of Vize which has a cluster of fine historic monuments that deserve to be much better known.
One of the first archaeological digs undertaken after the founding of the Turkish Republic was at Vize in the 1930s. Excavation of a local tumulus revealed a cache of Roman treasures now in the care of the İstanbul Archaeology Museum. Many other finds from later excavations are in the museum at Kırklareli.
Around town
Thrace’s position at the point where Europe converges on Asia means that it has been crisscrossed time and again by the armies of the powerful. The original settlers of Vize chose to build high up on a hillside where they could look down on the plain and see who was coming; it’s here that you will find the oldest surviving remains, of a 2nd-century Roman theatre. It is the only such theatre so far discovered in Thrace.
By Byzantine times the locals seem to have grown a bit more confident which means that their most conspicuous monument, the sixth-century church of Küçük Ayasofya (Little Ayasofya) is a little further down the hillside. This church was, however, small in name only. Dating back to the reign of the Emperor Justinian (which makes it virtually contemporary with the better known Ayasofya in İstanbul), it boasts a huge and unusual 16-sided dome. For many years it served as the seat of a bishopric.
Long since converted into the Gazi Süleymanpaşa Cami, the church was restored in the 2000s. Purists will wince at the PVC window-frames but the interior has been pleasingly repainted with sections of the original barely intelligible frescoes and later Ottoman wall paintings preserved alongside the new work. The church-mosque was built over the assumed site of a Temple of Apollo.
Close to the church-mosque stand stretches of Vize’s old city walls still with several towers largely intact, Nearby, too, is the restored late 14th-century Hasanbey Cami with a modern minaret tagged onto it. On my last visit the 17th-century hamam was also being prepared to get back to work again.
As soon as you leave Vize on the road for Kıyıköy you move into a world of dense, alluring greenery in sharp contrast to the concrete mess of development that sprawls all the way from İstanbul to Cerkezköy. This is still a thickly forested area with trout farms featurng small restaurants buried deep amid the oak and pine trees along with stretches of the aqueducts that used to convey water to Constantinople (İstanbul) and stretches of the 5th-century Anastasian or Long Walls, the outer defences of the city.
Sleeping
Most people visit Vize on a day trip from İstanbul although there is decent accommodation to be had in Kıyıköy.
Transport info
There are fairly regular buses from İstanbul’s Esenler otogar to Vize where you can pick up one of the less frequent local buses north to Kıyıköy (38km).
Day trip destinations
İğneada
