AT A GLANCE
Why go?
Kırımsat Plateau (Kırımsat yaylası) is a small highland settlement perched among the spruce forests and alpine meadows of the Ağaçbaşı plateau network in Güce district, Giresun province, on Turkey's eastern Black Sea coast. Its evocative name — traced to the old form "Kır Meşhed," meaning "martyrdom in the open meadow" — hints at centuries of pastoral life and the region's layered history as a frontier zone during the Turkification of the Pontic mountains.↗↗
Today, Kırımsat is one of nearly forty obası (seasonal hamlets) scattered across Güce's two main yayla systems. Visitors arriving at the cluster known as Ocak Tamı Mezra find the hallmark scenery of eastern Black Sea highlands: rolling velvet grasslands, dark stands of Norway spruce, thick banks of morning fog, and traditional wooden cabins where families still summer with their cattle and sheep.↗↗↗
A Name Born of the Land
Recent local research has uncovered that the name Kırımsat is not, as one might assume, a reference to the Crimean Tatar heritage sometimes associated with the suffix "-sat." Instead, the oba's name derives from "Kır Meşhed" — "kır" meaning open pasture or steppe and "meşhed" meaning a shrine or cemetery of martyrs. In the early centuries of Turkish settlement in the Pontic highlands, frontier warriors who fell in skirmishes against Byzantine holdouts were often buried in the open meadows, and their graves became places of reverence. The plateau was named for one such sacred clearing.
