Bilhorod-Dnistrovskyi Fortress

The fortress was built on the remains of Tyras, a Greek city on the Black Sea coast destroyed by Gothic and Hunnic attacks in the 4th century. In the 10th century Bilhorod belonged to Kievan Rus', later to the Kingdom of Hungary and then to Galicia-Volhynia, where it remained until the Mongol invasion.

When work began is not known; most historians take the fortress for a 13th-century trading exclave of the Republic of Genoa, on territory surrendered to the Golden Horde. The Genoese managed an alliance with the Mongols, and Bilhorod was officially a Tatar city under Genoese rule, commanding the Dniester estuary. Ottoman pressure cost Genoa its Black Sea influence late in the 14th century; Lithuania is held to have replaced it, and from the Lithuanians the Moldavians took the place.

Under Moldavian rule the town was Cetatea Albă, the White Citadel: in the 15th century some 20,000 Moldavians, Greeks, Genoese, Armenians, Jews and Tatars lived there. The main elements of the fortress at its centre were finished by 1440 — 34 towers, some of them 20 metres tall, walls of white limestone, and a deep moat outside.

One section completed that year was neither wall nor tower and had no defensive value: ten stone cannonballs are set into it as a talisman, in the pattern of a tetractys. A plate found in one of the towers reads 'Master Fedorko finished construction in 1440', which has carried a masonic reading, on thin ground; a drier explanation takes the figure for a sundial calendar.

Bogdan II was killed in an ambush laid by his brother Peter III Aaron in 1451, and in 1457 his son Stephen III took the Moldavian throne with help from his cousin Vlad the Impaler, prince of Wallachia. Stephen gave renewed attention to Cetatea Albă, the chief defensive centre of the south-east, on the trade route between Europe and Asia: stronger walls, a large gate that is still the main entrance, and a permanent garrison.

The hardest of the Ottoman attempts on the city came in August 1484, when a 300,000-strong army under sultan Bayezid II and 50,000 Crimean troops under Meñli I Giray, with more than a hundred large ships, closed on it from coast and estuary. It fell after nine days. Stephen the Great failed to recapture Bilhorod in 1485, and Turkish rule lasted 328 years.

Akkerman became one of the Ottomans' northern strongholds and drew ceaseless attack from Zaporozhian Cossack chieftains — Severyn Nalivaiko, Ivan Sulima and Ivan Sirko among them — and from Moldavians and Poles, yet held its name as impregnable. The Crimean khan İslâm II Giray died in the fortress and was buried in its mosque, of which one minaret remains. Melek Ahmed Pasha strengthened the defences in 1657, French engineers invited in 1707 laid a new bastion line, and after 1756 work went on almost every year.

Russian troops took the fortress for the first time in 1770, after a ten-day siege directed by brigadier Igelstrom, and handed it back in 1774 under the treaty of Kuchuk-Kainarji. In 1789 the town fell without a fight to Don Cossacks and a Jäger corps led by Mikhail Kutuzov, who became its commander the following year but held the post only briefly.

The Ottoman period ended in 1812: after the Russo-Turkish war of 1806–1812 the Treaty of Bucharest placed Bessarabia, Budjak included, under the Russian Empire. The fortress lost its strategic value in 1832 and was declared a historical and architectural monument in 1896.

The Romanian Army entered on 9 March 1918, fighting local troops led by the Bolsheviks, and later that month the Sfatul Țării proclaimed the union of all Bessarabia with Romania. Between the wars the Romanian administration restored and maintained it as a symbolic Romanian medieval monument.

Romania ceded the city to the Soviet Union on 28 June 1940; the name became Belgorod-Dniestrovski and Soviet authorities removed the Moldavian heraldic symbols. Romania regained it on 28 July 1941 and held it until 22 August 1944, when the Red Army reoccupied the city, which then passed to the Ukrainian SSR and, after 1991, to Ukraine.

The fortress was made a museum reserve. Twenty-six outer towers survive, and the interior rooms of the citadel have collapsed. One of the largest medieval fortresses in Ukraine, it entered the State Register of Immovable Monuments in 2009, is designated architectural heritage of national importance, and in 2019, with the remains of Tyras, was placed on Ukraine's tentative list of World Heritage Sites.