Adana

i.The Plain at the River's Broad Meander

Adana sits at the heart of the Çukurova — the broad alluvial plain that the ancients called the Plain of Cilicia (Cilicia Pedias), and which the modern country still treats as one of its two great agricultural heartlands. The plain is bound on the north and west by the long dark wall of the Taurus Mountains, on the east by the Amanos range that runs down toward Hatay, and on the south by the Mediterranean, where it meets the sea in a long, low coast of citrus orchards, fish farms, and shallow lagoons. Through the centre of it runs the Seyhan — the river the Greeks knew as the Sarus — which rises in the Taurus, drops onto the plain at Adana, and reaches the sea south of the city in a long, gentle delta.

The city was founded at a point where the river could be crossed easily, on a bank high enough to escape the spring floods. The Seyhan still defines the city: it splits Adana into two halves, runs under the Roman Taşköprü and the modern bridges, and is dammed upstream at the Seyhan Reservoir, whose water irrigates the cotton and the citrus on which the regional economy still rests. To stand on the Taşköprü at sunset, looking west along the river toward the Taurus catching the last of the light, is to understand at a glance why the city has been here, in this exact place, for eight thousand years.

A city of the plain — fed by the Seyhan, framed by the Taurus, looking south to the Mediterranean and east toward Mesopotamia.

ii.Tepebağ Höyük and the Neolithic Foundations

Walk to the southern edge of Adana's old quarter and you find, almost in the centre of the modern city, a rise of land called Tepebağ Höyük — the "vineyard-hill mound." It is a tell, the slow accumulation of one settlement after another on the same patch of ground, and its lowest layers date to around 6000 BCE, the Neolithic period when humankind across the Near East was first taking up settled life. The mound makes Adana one of the world's oldest continuously inhabited sites — a claim shared with a handful of places across Anatolia and the Levant, all of them mounds like this one, all of them tells where the same patch of fertile ground has carried village after village, city after city, for nearly the whole length of urban time.

The Çukurova was a natural place for early settlement. Two great rivers — the Seyhan and the Ceyhan (the ancient Pyramos), forty kilometres east — bring water down from the Taurus across an alluvial plain that the ancients found extraordinarily fertile. The climate is hot, the growing season long, the soil deep. Around the same time as Tepebağ was first occupied, the great mound of Çatalhöyük was rising on the Konya plain to the north, and the proto-cities of Mesopotamia were taking shape to the east. Cilicia, between them, was its own corridor of settlement — a country of mounds, not yet of named cities.

iii.Kizzuwatna and the Hittite Cilicia

By the second millennium BCE, the plain was the heart of a Bronze Age kingdom the Hittites called Kizzuwatna — a vassal state that ran the coastal corridor from the Taurus down to the sea, and whose capital sat in the area of modern Adana. A Hittite rock inscription dated to about 1650 BCE refers to the territory as Uru Adania — "the town of Adana" — which is, in our reading, the oldest written form of the name the city still carries. Around 1350 BCE Kizzuwatna was absorbed wholesale into the Hittite Federation, becoming a province of the great Bronze Age power whose centre was at Hattusha, far to the north.

What this matters for, narratively, is that Adana enters history not as a Greek or Roman city — though those layers come — but as a Hittite one, an Anatolian-language city whose first written name is its modern name. The Greek mythological etymology that the Valilik gives, naming the city for Adanus, the son of the sky-god Uranus, is one tradition among several; it is the Greek period reaching back to a name it found already in place and inventing a story for it. The deeper root is Hittite.

iv.Assyrians, Persians, and the Passage of Alexander

After the Bronze Age collapse around 1200 BCE, the great Anatolian states fragmented. Cilicia passed in and out of various powers across the early Iron Age. In the 9th century BCE the plain came under Assyrian rule, then in the 7th century under the Achaemenid Persians, who governed it as a satrapy. Persian rule was, by the standards of the period, light: the local Cilician dynasties continued to rule day to day, paying tribute to the Great King and providing troops when required. Herodotus records the Cilician tribute to Persia as five hundred talents of silver and five hundred white horses annually — a figure that signals the wealth of the plain in the imperial accounting of the day.

In 333 BCE, Alexander the Great passed through Cilicia on his march against the Persian king Darius III. The decisive engagement of the campaign — the Battle of Issus — was fought a hundred and twenty kilometres east of Adana, at the Plain of Issus near the modern town of Dörtyol (covered on the live İskenderun page), but Adana itself sat squarely on Alexander's line of march. The Valilik source records that the city "hosted Alexander and his army" in 333 BCE; the historical sources are thinner than that, but the practical fact is clear: a Macedonian army crossing the Çukurova on its way south to the Levant could not avoid the Seyhan, and would have crossed at Adana. After Alexander's death the city passed first to the Seleucids and then, with the rest of southern Anatolia, to the long Roman approach.

v.Roman Cilicia and Cicero's Year as Governor

Cilicia became a Roman province in 67 BCE, when Pompey the Great swept the eastern Mediterranean clear of the pirates who had infested the rough Cilician coast (covered in detail on the Mersin page). Pompey made Tarsus, west of Adana, the provincial capital. Adana itself was not the seat of imperial government, but it sat on the great Roman road that connected the eastern provinces to Anatolia and the West, and it prospered.

The single best-known Roman governor of Cilicia is the orator Marcus Tullius Cicero, who served his proconsulate of the province across 51 and 50 BCE. Cicero's letters from Cilicia — the Ad Atticum and the Ad Familiares, addressed to his confidant Atticus and to his political friends in Rome — give us the most intimate surviving portrait of any Roman provincial administration. He complains about the heat and the bandits; he praises the local notables; he frets about money; he negotiates with the petty kings of the Taurus. The Cilicia he describes is largely the plain we still call the Çukurova, with its Roman roads, its Hellenistic cities, its olive presses and its grain warehouses. The Valilik's claim that Adana under Cicero "became the largest commercial centre of the Eastern Roman Empire" overstates the case — Tarsus was the larger city in this period, and Antioch in Syria was the great eastern metropolis — but the underlying point holds. Cilicia was rich, and Adana was in it.

The single surviving monument of Roman Adana is the Taşköprü, the Stone Bridge over the Seyhan in the centre of the city. Tradition attributes the structure to the reign of the emperor Hadrian in the early 2nd century CE, though it may be older in part. It is one of the longest Roman bridges still standing — fourteen surviving arches across roughly three hundred metres of river — and it carried wheeled traffic across the Seyhan continuously, with periodic repairs, from the Roman period through the Ottoman and into the Republic. It now carries pedestrians only. To walk across it is to use a piece of imperial infrastructure that has been in service, in this exact place, for eighteen hundred years.

vi.Sasanian Raid, Byzantine Centuries, and the Arab Frontier

In 260 CE, a Sasanian army under Shapur I swept across eastern Anatolia in a great raid that captured the Roman emperor Valerian and sacked numerous cities; Adana was among the cities Shapur's army passed through. The Sasanian occupation was not lasting, and the city returned to Roman — then to East Roman, Byzantine — administration. For the next four hundred years Adana was a Byzantine provincial town, sometimes prosperous, sometimes a frontier station, the rhythm of its life dictated by the larger politics of Constantinople.

That changed in the 7th century, when the Arab conquest of the Levant brought a new frontier to the Çukurova. Cilicia became one of the great battlegrounds between the Byzantine empire and the Umayyad and then Abbasid caliphates. Adana itself was taken by Arab forces in the 8th century and held, intermittently, for the next two centuries as part of the Cilician frontier zone — the so-called thughur, a chain of fortified cities (Adana, Tarsus, Misis, Anazarbus) from which Muslim armies could strike north into Anatolia and into which Byzantine armies repeatedly counter-attacked. The cycle of capture and recapture left its mark on the city: when in the 10th century the Byzantine emperor Nikephoros II Phokas recovered the plain, Adana was returned to imperial control, but it was a much-rebuilt city by then, and the centuries of frontier warfare had thinned its population.

vii.Armenian Cilicia and the Mongol Shadow

In the 11th century the Seljuk advance into Anatolia after Manzikert (1071) reached the Çukurova, but the area soon became the heart of a new Christian power: the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia, founded by Armenian princes who had migrated south from their ancestral highlands after the Seljuk conquests. The Armenian kingdom flourished from the late 11th into the 14th century, with capitals at Sis (modern Kozan, north-east of Adana) and at Anavarza (ancient Anazarbus, also in Adana province). Adana itself was part of this Armenian kingdom for nearly three hundred years, and the ruins of the period — the great hilltop castle at Sis, the spread of Anavarza in the plain — still mark the landscape of the modern province.

The Armenian kingdom fell in the 14th century to the Mamluks of Egypt, who briefly held the plain and absorbed it into their wider Levantine state. The Mamluk period in Adana was short, but it marks the transition: from this point onward, the Çukurova was Turkish-speaking and Muslim, and the medieval Christian Cilicia gave way to the Turkish principalities of the late medieval Anatolian world.

viii.The Ramazanid Beylik (1352–1517): An Adana-Centred Principality

In 1352, with the Mamluk grip on the plain loosening and the great Anatolian beyliks rising elsewhere, a Turkic dynasty founded by Ramazan Bey established itself in the Çukurova with its capital at Adana. The Ramazanoğlu Beylik — the Ramazanid Principality — would rule the plain for the next hundred and sixty-five years, and is the single most Adana-centric chapter in the city's history. Almost every other power that ruled here did so from somewhere else: the Hittites from Hattusha, Rome from Tarsus, the Byzantines from Constantinople, the Mamluks from Cairo. The Ramazanids ruled from Adana, and they made the city, for the first time in a very long while, the political centre of its own region.

The dynasty's architectural legacy is the Adana Ulu Camii — the Great Mosque of Adana — begun by Halil Bey of the Ramazanids in the early 16th century and completed under early Ottoman rule, in 1541. It stands in the Kemeraltı quarter, near the bazaar, and combines a Ramazanid plan with Ottoman finishing; the black-and-white stone work, the tall single minaret, and the adjacent türbe (mausoleum) of the Ramazanid sultans give the complex a distinctive Cilician character that is neither pure Anatolian Turkish nor pure Mamluk, but something in between — the architecture of a place that sat on the frontier between the two.

In 1517, Sultan Selim I — Yavuz Sultan Selim, "the Stern" — passed through Adana on his way south to the conquest of Mamluk Egypt. The Ramazanids submitted, the principality was absorbed into the Ottoman state, and for the next four centuries Adana would be an Ottoman provincial city. The Ramazanid dynasty itself continued in a reduced administrative role into the 17th century, but the independent beylik was over.

ix.Ottoman Adana

Under the Ottomans, Adana became the centre of a sancak (sub-province) within the larger eyalet of Aleppo, and later the capital of the Adana Vilayet, established as a separate province in 1867. The Ottoman city was prosperous: the Çukurova in the 19th century became one of the great cotton-producing regions of the eastern Mediterranean, supplying mills in Egypt and Europe, and the city expanded rapidly as cotton money flowed in. The American Civil War in the 1860s, which choked off cotton exports from the southern United States, sent prices soaring and brought a boom to the Çukurova that built much of the late-Ottoman city we still see — the merchants' houses, the cotton godowns, the railway that reached the city in 1886 (the line from Mersin to Adana, one of the first in the empire), and the wider 19th-century quarters that grew beyond the old walls.

The sultans passed through. Süleyman the Magnificent stopped here in 1535 on his eastern campaign against the Safavids. Murad IV rested his army at Adana in 1638 on the way to retake Baghdad from the Persians. In 1833, the Egyptian rebel İbrahim Pasha, son of Mehmed Ali of Egypt, brought his army through Adana during his revolt against the Ottoman state — an interlude of Egyptian rule over Cilicia that lasted until 1840, when Ottoman authority was restored under the diplomatic pressure of the European powers.

x.The French Occupation and the National Struggle (1918–1922)

Of all the chapters of Adana's history, the one the city itself most often remembers is the four-and-a-half-year French occupation that followed the First World War. On 31 October 1918, with the Mudros Armistice just signed and the Ottoman state in collapse, Mustafa Kemal arrived in Adana to take command of the Ottoman Yıldırım Army Group from the German field marshal Otto Liman von Sanders, who had commanded it during the Palestine campaign. It was at Adana, according to the established Turkish historiography, that Kemal gave the first signal of what would become the War of Independence, with the famous remark — preserved in the Valilik source — that "the war may be over for the Allies; but the war that concerns us, the war for our own future, is only now beginning."

Within weeks, French forces — moving up from the Levant, partly as the implementing power of the Sykes–Picot arrangement and partly with the support of Légion arménienne units who hoped to see a restored Cilician Armenia carved out of the plain — began to occupy the Çukurova. The French formally entered Adana in early 1919. The occupation that followed was bitter and violent. Communal relations broke down between the Muslim majority and the Armenian community whose presence in Cilicia had been reduced by the 1915 wartime relocation (tehcir) and which was now returning to the plain under French protection. The French command struggled to contain the situation. Across 1919 and 1920 the Cilician resistance — organised through the Kilikya Milli Kuvvetler Teşkilatı (the Cilician National Forces Organisation) — fought a sustained guerrilla campaign against French and Légion arménienne units across the plain and into the Taurus.

The resistance was sufficient. In November 1920, French forces in Cilicia suffered a series of reverses, and the French government in Paris recognised the Ankara government of the Turkish Grand National Assembly (TBMM) as the de facto authority north of the Syrian frontier. On 20 October 1921, the Ankara Agreement was signed between France and the TBMM, fixing the future Syrian border and arranging French withdrawal from Cilicia. On 5 January 1922 French forces left the Çukurova for good, and Adana became a city of the new Turkish state then taking shape. The date is still commemorated annually in Adana as the city's Kurtuluş Günü — Liberation Day.

xi.Republican Adana and the Modern City

Modern Adana is the fourth-largest metropolitan area in Türkiye after Istanbul, Ankara, and İzmir, with a city-and-surrounding population of approximately 1.77 million as of the 2022 census. It is the unmistakable capital of the Çukurova — the place where the regional economy is organised, the place where the plain's agricultural wealth is processed and exported. Cotton and citrus remain the great staples; soy, peanuts, and corn are intensively grown; the textile, food-processing, chemical, and steel industries of the modern Republic are heavily concentrated here.

The city's modern skyline is dominated by the Sabancı Merkez Camii, the Sabancı Central Mosque, completed in 1998 through the philanthropy of the Sabancı family — one of the great industrial dynasties of Republican Türkiye, and Adanalı by origin. With six minarets and a capacity of roughly twenty-eight thousand worshippers, the Sabancı is among the largest mosques in Türkiye. It stands on the south bank of the Seyhan, directly opposite the old quarter, and its great dome is visible across the plain from many kilometres away. Architecturally it is a 20th-century revival of the classical Ottoman synthesis — broadly modelled on the Selimiye in Edirne — and it has, since its completion, become the visual anchor of the modern city.

The Çukurova has continued to develop as one of Türkiye's most heavily industrialised regions. The Çukurova International Airport (COV), opened in August 2024 north-west of the metropolitan area, has replaced the older Adana Şakirpaşa Airport and now serves both Adana and the wider plain. The Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant, under construction at Gülnar on the Mersin coast, is scheduled to bring its first reactor online in 2026 and will eventually provide roughly ten per cent of the national grid. For a sustained account of the regional economy and infrastructure — Mersin Port, the Free Zone, the export pipeline — see our sister site Çukurova.info.

xii.The Adana Table

To name a city after a dish is not a small thing. Adana kebabı — hand-minced lamb pressed onto a flat skewer over open coals, finished with sumac onion and grilled tomato and pepper — is the city's signature food and one of a handful of dishes in Türkiye that carries a formal Geographical Indication from the Türk Patent ve Marka Kurumu, restricting the right to the name to producers who follow the registered method. The Adana way insists on hand-mincing — never machine-ground — and on a precisely controlled fat-to-meat ratio in the lamb. The kebap is served over a flat sheet of lavaş, with grilled vegetables and a wedge of lemon, and it is eaten the moment it leaves the skewer.

The drink that goes with it is şalgam — fermented purple-carrot juice, salty and sour, deep red in the glass, served cold and either mild or hot (acılı) with chilli. Şalgam is poured into a small tumbler alongside the rakı at the kebap table, or drunk neat as a cold cleansing partner to the fat of the grilled lamb. It is, like the kebap itself, a regional specialty produced commercially across the Çukurova and found in formal form in almost no other part of Türkiye.

For the cooking — proportions, technique, the kindling of the coal — see our sister site TurkishCooking.com. The essay on Adana kebabı and şalgam as cultural objects, with their histories and their place in the regional table, is forthcoming on this site under Anatolian Tables.

xiii.Visiting Adana Today

Adana is reached by domestic flights into Çukurova International (COV), or by the high-speed and conventional rail from Mersin (forty minutes) and Konya (three hours). The bus connections are dense; the Adana otogar is one of the busiest in the country. Around the centre, the city is best navigated on foot or by metro: a single line connects the northern districts down through the centre and across the Seyhan.

The essential cluster of sights is in the old quarter on the north bank: the Taşköprü (Roman bridge), the Ulu Camii (Ramazanid–Ottoman Great Mosque), the Adana Arkeoloji Müzesi (Archaeological Museum, with finds from across the Çukurova), and the warren of the Kemeraltı bazaar. South across the river is the Sabancı Merkez Camii, often best visited at sunset when the dome and minarets catch the last light. Further afield, the Çukurova holds several of the great Roman and Byzantine sites of southern Türkiye: Misis (ancient Mopsuestia, with its 4th-century mosaics in the Misis Mozaik Müzesi), Anavarza (ancient Anazarbus, the ruined Cilician city near Kozan), and on the coast the Roman port of Yumurtalık (Roman Aegae). Each is worth a half-day from the city.