Aksaray

i.Below Mount Hasan

Aksaray sits on the southern Cappadocian plain at the foot of Hasan Dağı — Mount Hasan — the great extinct volcano whose 3,253-metre peak rises to the south-east of the city and dominates the horizon from every direction. The city itself stands on a low rise above the Uluırmak (the Ihlara) river, surrounded by the wheat plain of the Konya basin to the west and by the volcanic country of inner Cappadocia to the north and east. The geological history is everything: Hasan Dağı, Erciyes Dağı (to the north-east, in Kayseri province), and the now-extinct Melendiz volcano have laid down successive layers of volcanic tuff across this country, and it is the tuff — soft, easily carved, holding any shape it is cut into — that has made Cappadocia possible. The fairy chimneys of Göreme, the rock-cut churches of the Ihlara Valley, the underground cities of Derinkuyu and Kaymaklı are all stories the tuff tells. Aksaray is on the southern edge of this country and is in many ways its gateway.

A city of the volcanic plateau — built and rebuilt by every people that has crossed central Anatolia, named in turn seven different ways, but always under the same volcano.

ii.Çatalhöyük's Volcano and the Neolithic

The deepest known reference to Hasan Dağı — and therefore, by extension, to the Aksaray plain — is one of the most famous images of Anatolian prehistory. In the Neolithic settlement of Çatalhöyük (on the Konya plain, just west of Aksaray province), a mural dated to around 6600 BCE depicts what archaeologists since James Mellaart have read as a town in the foreground with an erupting twin-peaked volcano in the background. The identification with Hasan Dağı (also twin-peaked) is debated — some scholars read the mural as a leopard-skin pattern — but the case for the volcanic reading is strong, and if correct, it makes the image one of the oldest surviving depictions of any landscape in the world. Either way, the Neolithic settlement of the Aksaray plain is confirmed by surface finds at Böget and Koçaş villages.

iii.Acemhöyük and the Assyrian Trade Colonies

The single most important Bronze Age site in Aksaray province is the great mound of Acemhöyük, twenty kilometres north of the city, which preserves the remains of an Assyrian trading colony (kārum) of the early second millennium BCE. Acemhöyük flourished in the first half of the second millennium as one of the principal nodes of the Old Assyrian Trade Network (c. 2000–1700 BCE), through which Assyrian merchants from Aššur (modern northern Iraq) carried tin and textiles into central Anatolia and brought silver and copper back. The Assyrians knew cuneiform; the clay tablets recovered from Acemhöyük (and from the related Kanesh / Kültepe near Kayseri, the network's main hub) are the earliest written documents from Anatolia, predating the rise of the Hittites. The mound was occupied continuously from around 3000 BCE through the Middle Bronze Age; the most spectacular finds, now in the Aksaray Museum, come from the destruction layer of around 1700 BCE.

iv.Nenessa, Şinukhtu, Garsaura — the City's Layered Names

Around 1700 BCE, an Indo-European-speaking people from the Caucasus established what would become the Old Hittite State across central Anatolia. The Aksaray site enters the written record under the Hittite name Nenessa (Nenossos), mentioned in Hittite documents from the time of Hattušili I as among the cities the Hittite kings campaigned against and absorbed. Hittite dominion lasted until around 1200 BCE, when the Sea Peoples and the broader Bronze Age collapse brought down the central Anatolian states.

In the Iron Age, the city is documented in Neo-Assyrian sources as Şinakhatum / Şinukhtu, a Late Hittite city-state of the region the Assyrians called Tabal, ruled in the late 8th century BCE by a local king named Kiakki. Şinukhtu was conquered by the Assyrian king Sargon II in 718 BCE. The Hieroglyphic Luwian inscriptions of the period also give the city the name Kurşaura / Karşaura, which the British classicist W. M. Ramsay equated with the later Greek Garsaura — the form by which the city was known in the Hellenistic and early Roman periods.

Cappadocia passed under successive empires: the Phrygians, the Cimmerians, the Lydians, the Persians (the word Cappadocia itself is first attested at the great Behistun inscription of Darius I in 521–486 BCE, as Old Persian Katpatuka, traditionally read as "country of beautiful horses"), and finally — after Alexander's victory in 333 BCE — the Hellenistic successor states. Garsaura was the centre of the region the geographer Strabo (12.2.6) calls Garsauritis.

v.Archelaïs of the Cappadocian Kingdom

The Hellenistic Cappadocian Kingdom — a successor state to the Achaemenid satrapy, ruled by an indigenous Iranianised dynasty descending from Ariarathes I — held central Anatolia from the late 4th century BCE through the late 1st century BCE as a Roman client kingdom. The last Cappadocian king was Archelaus (reigned c. 36 BCE – 17 CE), installed by Mark Antony and confirmed by Augustus. Around 42 BCE, Archelaus refounded Garsaura as a royal city under his own name — Archelaïs — and developed it as a regional capital. When the emperor Tiberius annexed Cappadocia and made it a Roman province in 17 CE, Archelaïs was raised to the status of a Roman colonia — Colonia Archelaïs — under Claudius, a privilege held by only a handful of cities in the eastern empire.

vi.Roman and Byzantine Archelais

Through the Roman and early Byzantine centuries, Archelais was an important Cappadocian provincial city, a stop on the great east–west road that connected the Aegean coast to the Cilician Gates and beyond to Syria. The city minted its own coinage under Septimius Severus, Caracalla, and Severus Alexander. The early Christian community of Cappadocia produced some of the great fathers of the Eastern Church — Basil the Great of Caesarea (modern Kayseri), his brother Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianzus (whose home village of Nazianzus lay in what is now the Aksaray countryside, near modern Bekarlar). The "Cappadocian Fathers" of the 4th century are the theological architects of the doctrine of the Trinity and remain among the most important figures in Eastern Christian history.

From the late 6th century the Sasanians raided Cappadocia repeatedly — Kayseri was held for a year in 605; Niğde was attacked in 608 — and Archelais shared in the disruption. The collapse of Sasanian power and the rise of Islam in the 7th century opened a new frontier. The first Arab raid on Archelais came in 699 / 80 H, under the Umayyad commander Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan. For the next century and a half Cappadocia was a contested frontier zone, with armies of the Abbasid Caliphate and the Byzantine empire crossing it repeatedly. The famous diplomatic exchange between Caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd and the Byzantine emperor Nikephoros I in 805–806 — recorded by the Arab historian al-Baladhuri in his Futūḥ al-Buldān — turned on tribute payments levied against Cappadocian cities including Archelais.

The Cappadocian rock-cut Christian heritage dates from this long period of frontier insecurity. The carved-tuff churches and monasteries of the Ihlara Valley, of Selime, of Güzelyurt, and of the underground cities at Derinkuyu and Kaymaklı were created by Byzantine Christian communities seeking refuge from Arab raids. They are the great surviving monument of the Byzantine Cappadocian heartland.

vii.Kılıç Arslan II Founds Aksaray (1170) — "The White Palace"

The Battle of Manzikert in 1071 opened Anatolia to Turkic settlement; Cappadocia fell within the first generation. The city was taken from the Byzantines by the Anatolian Seljuks in 1142. The decisive moment came under Sultan Kılıç Arslan II (reigned 1156–1192), the great consolidator of the Anatolian Seljuk state. In 1170 / 566 H, Kılıç Arslan II refounded the city of Archelais as a new Seljuk royal city, building a White Palace (Ak Saray) above the river that would give the new city its name: Aksaray. The Sultan made Aksaray the second capital of the Anatolian Seljuk sultanate, after Konya; brought scholars, jurists, and Sufis from across the Islamic world; and declared the city a Dârü'l-cihâd ("Abode of Holy War") and a Dârü'z-Zafer ("Abode of Victory"). Because Kılıç Arslan II reportedly forbade the settlement of "evil people" in his new city, Aksaray also came to be known as Şehr-i Süleha — "City of the Pious."

Under Kılıç Arslan II's grandson ʿIzz al-Dīn Kaykāʾūs I (reigned 1211–1220), the great Sufi philosopher Muhyiddin Ibn al-ʿArabī — author of the Fusūs al-Hikam and one of the most important figures in the entire history of Islamic mysticism — spent time at Aksaray, where he wrote one of his treatises on the city's cultural standing. The Aksaray of the early 13th century was, briefly, one of the great Persianate cultural centres of the eastern Mediterranean.

viii.Sultanhanı and the Anatolian Seljuk Network

The single most important surviving Seljuk monument of Aksaray province is the Sultanhanı caravanserai, forty kilometres west of the city on the Konya road, built in 1229 (627 H) by Sultan ʿAlāʾ al-Dīn Kayqubād I — the great Seljuk patron-builder. The Sultanhanı is the largest Seljuk caravanserai in Anatolia: a fortified rectangular complex measuring roughly 4,900 square metres, with a monumental decorated portal, a central courtyard surrounded by chambers, a kiosk-mosque in the centre of the courtyard raised on four arches, a hammam, and a covered winter hall at the rear with a tall lantern. The structure was one of a network of perhaps a hundred such caravanserais built across Anatolia in the early 13th century, spaced roughly one day's caravan-march apart along the great trade roads, providing free shelter and supplies to merchants and pilgrims for up to three nights. The Sultanhanı is one of the finest surviving expressions of the Anatolian Seljuk architectural style: yellow limestone, intricate muqarnas portal carving, twin minaret-like turrets flanking the gate, and the unmistakable rhythm of pointed vaults inside.

A second significant caravanserai of the province, Hoca Mesud Kervansarayı (Ribât-ı Hoca Mesud), stands at the village of Ağzıkarahan, built around 1240. Together with the Sultanhanı, these two structures preserve the architectural language of the Seljuk trade-road system in its purest form.

ix.Mongols, Karamanids, and the Ottoman Absorption (1470)

After the Seljuk defeat at the Battle of Köse Dağ in 1243, Anatolia passed under Mongol Ilkhanid administration; Aksaray was repeatedly sacked through the late 13th century in the Ilkhanid succession wars. The contemporary Aksaraylı historian Kerimüddin Mahmud Aksarayî, in his Persian chronicle, gives an eyewitness account of the Mongol commander Konkurtay's sack of the city, in which six thousand Aksaraylıs are said to have died. The Zinciriye Medresesi (1336–1337), built in the early Ilkhanid period and named for the chain that hung over its portal, survives from this era.

After the collapse of Ilkhanid authority in the mid-14th century, Aksaray became the centre of a three-way struggle between the Karamanid beylik (centred at Karaman, west of Aksaray), the Eretnid state (centred at Sivas to the north-east), and the personally-formidable Eretnid nāib Kadı Burhaneddin of Sivas. The Karamanids — Mehmed Bey, Alâeddin Bey, İbrahim Bey, Pir Ahmed, Kasım Bey — held Aksaray for much of this period. After the Ottomans absorbed the Karamanid lands, Sultan Mehmed II "the Conqueror" (Fatih) sent his vizier İshak Paşa to take Aksaray in 1470. The Ottoman absorption was completed with a famous demographic transfer: a substantial portion of the Aksaraylı population was forcibly deported to the new Ottoman capital at Istanbul and settled in a quarter that took the name Aksaray — the modern Aksaray neighbourhood of Istanbul (the great Aksaray Meydanı near the Marmaray station) preserves this 15th-century demographic origin.

x.Ottoman Aksaray and Piri Mehmed Paşa

Through the Ottoman centuries Aksaray was a quiet sancak of the Karaman Eyalet, governed from the great Ottoman provincial centre at Konya. The most distinguished Aksaraylı of the Ottoman period was Piri Mehmed Paşa (c. 1465–1532), grand vizier under Selim I "the Stern" (Yavuz Sultan Selim) and briefly into the reign of Süleyman the Magnificent. Piri Mehmed served as grand vizier from 1518 to 1523, the years that covered the conclusion of the eastern campaign against the Mamluks and the early years of Süleyman's reign — perhaps the single most consequential decade in Ottoman administrative history. He was eventually dismissed and retired to his native Aksaray, where he died in 1532.

The Ottoman city centred on the Ulu Camii (Great Mosque), originally Karamanid-period, repeatedly restored under Ottoman administration. Other surviving Ottoman-period structures include the Beramuniyye Medresesi and the Ebubekriye Medresesi. The Ottoman salnames (provincial yearbooks) record the city through the 18th and 19th centuries as a small but stable provincial centre.

xi.The Republic and the Re-Establishment as Province (1989)

Aksaray was a province in its own right from 1920 through the first decade of the Republic. In 1933 the province was abolished and Aksaray was reorganised as a kaza (administrative subdivision) attached to Niğde. For fifty-six years Aksaray was a district of Niğde province. On 15 June 1989 (Law no. 3578), Aksaray was re-established as a province in its own right — one of a number of administrative reorganisations of central Anatolia in the late 1980s that recognised the growth of regional cities. The 1989 re-establishment brought a substantial expansion of the city: Aksaray University was founded in 1991 (separating from Niğde Üniversitesi), the modern administrative quarter was laid out, and the population grew steadily from around 100,000 in the 1990s to around 250,000 today.

xii.Ihlara Valley, Selime, and the Cappadocian Country

Aksaray's deepest attraction is, ultimately, the surrounding Cappadocian country. The Ihlara Valley (Ihlara Vadisi) — a fourteen-kilometre canyon cut by the Melendiz river through the volcanic tuff plateau, with vertical walls up to 150 metres high — is the great rock-cut Christian valley of southern Cappadocia. The valley is home to more than a hundred Byzantine rock-cut churches dating from the 6th to the 13th centuries, of which a dozen or so preserve substantial frescoes: the Ağaçaltı Kilisesi (Church under the Tree), the Yılanlı Kilise (Snake Church), the Kokar Kilise (Fragrant Church), the Sümbüllü Kilise (Hyacinth Church), the Kırk Damaltı Kilisesi (Saint George Church) — each named for its principal feature or fresco. The walk down the canyon from the Ihlara village trailhead to the village of Belisırma takes three to four hours and is one of the great walks in Turkish travel.

At the north end of the valley, the Selime Cathedral (Selime Katedrali) is a vast rock-cut church-and-monastery complex carved into a tuff pinnacle — kitchens, refectories, stables, dormitories, the great basilical church with its sculpted columns. The Selime complex is the largest rock-cut religious structure in Cappadocia and one of the most spectacular surviving Byzantine monuments anywhere in Türkiye.

To the east of Aksaray, the wider Cappadocian country extends into Nevşehir (the fairy chimneys of Göreme), Niğde, and Kayseri (the Cappadocian capital under the late Roman empire). Aksaray's natural visitor circuit is southern Cappadocia: a day in the Ihlara Valley; a day in the Hasan Dağı country with the Selime complex, the Güzelyurt rock-cut underground city, and the volcano itself; a day at the Sultanhanı caravanserai en route west to Konya or east to Nevşehir.

xiii.Visiting Aksaray Today

Aksaray is reached by domestic flights from Istanbul and Ankara into Aksaray Airport (under construction at time of writing; in the interim, Kayseri Erkilet and Nevşehir Kapadokya airports both serve the region), or by long-distance bus from Ankara (three and a half hours), Konya (two hours), or Kayseri (two and a half hours). The Konya–Kayseri main road runs immediately south of the city. A rental car is the most flexible way to reach the surrounding Cappadocian sites; the Ihlara Valley, the Sultanhanı, and Selime are all within an hour of the city.

The city itself can be done in a half-day: the Aksaray Müzesi (with the Acemhöyük finds), the Ulu Camii, the Zinciriye Medresesi, and a walk along the river through the old quarter. Allow two further days for the wider province: a full day for the Ihlara Valley walk and the Selime complex; a full day for Sultanhanı and a sortie up toward Hasan Dağı. Travellers with more time should extend the trip east into the central Cappadocian country around Göreme, Üçhisar, Ortahisar, and Avanos.

The Aksaray table reflects the country: the great wheat-and-meat dishes of the central plateau, the famous Aksaray Halvası (a local helva), Etli Ekmek (the long thin meat pizza characteristic of the Konya–Aksaray belt), tandır kebabı, and the high-meadow dairy products of the surrounding villages. For the broader central Anatolian table, see Anatolian Tables; for recipes, our sister site TurkishCooking.com.