Çorlu

Çorlu stands on open flatland in Thrace, on the historic road between Constantinople and Greece. Greeks, Persians, Romans and Byzantines successively controlled the area. In Roman and Byzantine times the town was called Tzouroulos or Syrallo, later Tiroloi. Some writers have identified it with the Roman fort of Caenophrurium, where Emperor Aurelian was murdered in 275, but the Antonine Itinerary and the Peutinger Table place the two sites apart.

Murad I brought the town under Ottoman control and ordered the Roman walls pulled down, part of a policy of opening towns to the Ottoman peace. Çorlu remained an important staging post on the road from Constantinople to Greece. In August 1511, Sultan Bayezid II defeated his son Selim at the nearby village of Uğraşdere; a year later Selim overthrew his father. Bayezid died at Çorlu on his way into exile at Dimetoka, and Selim himself died there nine years into his reign. In the late eighteenth century, Turkish refugees from Crimea were settled in the town after the Ottomans lost the peninsula to Russia.