The fortress of Akkerman is located on a promontory inside the estuary (liman) of the Dniester River, some 15 km from the point where the river enters the Black Sea. With a circumference of over 2 km, an area of 9 hectares, double walls, a ditch 13 m. deep, and 30 towers still standing, it is one of the most remarkable architectural and cultural monuments of the Black Sea region.
Akkerman fortress was variously known as Moncastro or Cetatea Alba. It is built on top of the remains of ancient Tyras, a Greek trading settlement founded in the 6th c. BC by colonists from Miletus in western Anatolia. In the 2nd c. AD Tyras was a Roman frontier post, and it survived until the 3rd c. when it was destroyed by the Goths. Thereafter the site was in Byzantine, possibly Ruthenian, and Genoese hands, before being held for a century by the principality of Moldavia. In 1484, the fortress was conquered by the Ottoman sultan Bayezid II (r. 1481-1512), and for most of a period of more than three hundred years, until the Russian Empire annexed it in 1806, Akkerman was held by the Ottomans. It became part of a chain of massive strongholds protecting the Black Sea-the 'Ottoman lake'-and its coasts from attackers from the north, first Ukrainian Cossack raiders and forces of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and then in the 18th c. those of the Russian Empire. Given its strategic location on one of the two great rivers that flow south from the steppe into the Black Sea-the other is the Dnieper-it was among the most forbidding of the fortresses that stretched in an arc from the Danube to the Sea of Azov, and is one of the best-preserved.
