Guide
Engüzek Castle stands in the village of Dikyar in the Uzundere district of Erzurum, in the historical region of Tao. It is a medieval castle left by the Georgians. The name comes from the old name of the village, and it is also known as Üngüzek Castle and as Engüzekkapı Castle; in the medieval written sources it appears as Ağca Kala.
Tao was one of the regions that made up Georgia in the Middle Ages, and the Ottomans took the village where the castle stands from the Georgians in the middle of the sixteenth century. According to the detailed Ottoman register of 1574, Engüzek was a fair-sized settlement of 142 households. In a Georgian work recounting the events of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the castle appears as Ağca Kala; as with the Ağca Kala in the Çıldır district, that name may be a translation into Turkish of the Georgian Tetrtsikhe, which means the same thing.
Standing south-east of the village, Engüzek was the most important castle in the Tortum valley in the Middle Ages. It controlled the valley of the Tortum stream and the old road coming up along the Çorgenisi valley from the bank of the Çoruh; that road then passed under the control of Oşnaki Castle on the Çoruh itself.
When the castle was built is not known exactly. It has been argued that Turkish lords built it in the Middle Ages, but the church inside it shows that the building was not put up by Muslims.
The castle stands in the Dere quarter of Dikyar at 1,180 metres above sea level, on a rock that is hard to reach. It is built of roughly worked stones of middling size set in lime mortar and measures 78 by 38 metres. It has come down to us largely sound, and its surviving walls reach thirty metres in height. There are four towers.
Inside are a church, cisterns, storerooms, parts of a tunnel running down to the stream and the remains of various other buildings. At the foot of the castle, beside a small stream, stand the remains of a bath built in the Ottoman period.
