Çorum

i.The Hill Country Between Plateau and Black Sea

Çorum sits in the broken hill country of north-central Anatolia, between the open central plateau to its south and the Pontic Alps and Black Sea coast to its north. The provincial capital — at 801 metres — lies on the Çorum Çayı (a small tributary of the Yeşilırmak) in a fertile small basin; the country northward rises through wooded ridges to the rolling Iskilip and Kargı hill country and on to the Pontic forests in Kastamonu and Sinop provinces. The province is classified administratively as part of the Black Sea region, but its geography and climate are essentially central-Anatolian: dry continental, with cold winters and warm dry summers. The fertile basins of the Çorum Ovası, the Mecitözü plain, and the Alaca district have carried agricultural settlement continuously since the Chalcolithic period.

ii.The Hittite Heartland — Hattuşa, Alacahöyük, and Şapinuva

The country that is now Çorum province was, in the Late Bronze Age, the political heartland of the Hittite empire — the dominant power of Anatolia from roughly the 17th to the 12th centuries BCE. The Hittite imperial capital at Hattuşa (modern Boğazkale) lay in the southeastern part of modern Çorum province; we treat it in detail in our Hattusha essay. The UNESCO World Heritage inscription of 1986 (under cultural criteria i, ii, iii, and iv) recognises the site as one of the great Bronze Age archaeological landscapes of the eastern Mediterranean.

Within the same province lie two other major Hittite centres. Alacahöyük, in the modern Alaca district 35 kilometres north of Boğazkale, is the second-largest excavated Hittite site of central Anatolia — a great fortified citadel-and-temple complex of the Old Kingdom (c. 1700–1500 BCE), with the famous Sphinx Gate and the royal tombs of the Hattian Early Bronze Age (c. 2500–2200 BCE) whose gold-and-electrum sun-disc standards are among the most distinguished prehistoric finds of Türkiye. Şapinuva at modern Ortaköy in central Çorum province, excavated since 1990, is the third great Hittite centre of the area — a substantial provincial capital under several Hittite kings of the 14th century BCE, with a large palace complex and a cuneiform archive that has substantially expanded the modern understanding of late-Hittite imperial administration. Together with Hattuşa, the three sites place the Hittite imperial heartland in modern Çorum province.

The Hattuşa-Alacahöyük complex is, since 1988, the centre of the Boğazköy-Alacahöyük Milli Parkı, covering 2,634 hectares and administered by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism as a single managed heritage landscape.

iii.The Neo-Hittite and Phrygian Iron Age

After the Hittite imperial collapse around 1180 BCE, the country passed through the dark-age centuries that followed the Bronze Age collapse. By the 9th and 8th centuries BCE it had become part of the orbit of the Phrygian kingdom centred at Gordion to the southwest, with several small Neo-Hittite-Phrygian fortified centres in the Çorum hill country. The country passed under Persian Achaemenid rule in the 6th century BCE, and under Hellenistic rule after Alexander.

iv.Roman, Byzantine, and Danişmendli

Under the Romans the country was part of the province of Galatia, with no city of metropolitan importance — the principal Roman-period centres of the area were at Tavium (in modern Yozgat) and Amasia (Amasya) to the east. The modern town of Çorum first appears in the Byzantine sources as the small fortified centre of Yankoniya (or Eukhaita), with a 10th-century reputation as the site of the relics of Saint Theodore Tiron. The Turkish capture of the country came after the Byzantine defeat at Manzikert in 1071; through the 12th century it was held by the Turkmen Danişmendli Beylik (see our Sivas essay) and from the late 12th century by the Anatolian Seljuk Sultanate of Rûm.

v.Seljuk and Ottoman Çorum

Under the Seljuks Çorum was a working second-rank centre of the central plateau; the late-12th-century Ulu Camii (rebuilt several times since, surviving fabric mostly 14th–15th-century) is the principal Seljuk-period monument. After the post-Mongol fragmentation the country passed through the small Eretnid and Kadı Burhaneddin states; Ottoman annexation came in the early 15th century under Mehmed I. Through the long Ottoman centuries Çorum was a steady regional centre of the Sivas Eyaleti — a working market town famous, in the Ottoman trade reports, for its hand-spinning and weaving cottage industries, its copper utensils (Çorum bakır işi), and its leather products. Britannica's plain summary: "Çorum is a historic town on old trade routes from central Anatolia to the Black Sea coast that became famous for its hand-spinning and weaving cottage industries, the manufacture of copper utensils, and its leather products."

vi.Çorum Leblebisi — the City's Speciality

One culinary tradition has carried the city's name across Türkiye for at least two centuries: çorum leblebisi — twice-roasted chickpeas, the regional speciality. The process — denenmiş, "the proven way," in the local idiom — involves selecting the right small-grained chickpea variety from the Sungurlu and Mecitözü plains, slow-soaking, slow-drying, and a double-roasting in iron pans over wood fires. The result is the hard, golden, husk-free roasted chickpea that, eaten plain or salted, is the principal salty snack of Anatolian Türkiye and the most recognisable foodstuff of Çorum. The city has, since the 1990s, hosted an annual Çorum Leblebi Festivali in early autumn; the leblebi guild (the descendants of the Ottoman-period leblebiciler) remains one of the principal trade organisations of the modern city.

vii.The Republic and the Modern Province

Çorum was made a province under the Republican administrative reorganisation of 1924. Through the 20th century the city grew steadily — modern industries including cement, textiles, and food processing developed from the 1950s onward; the Çorum Organize Sanayi Bölgesi (Organised Industrial Zone) opened in the 1970s. Under the TÜİK 2024 address-based registration count the province population is 521,335. The metropolitan municipality covers fourteen districts. The central Merkez (~297,000) carries about 57 per cent of the provincial population. The largest secondary districts are Sungurlu (~49,000, the principal market town of the western plain), Osmancık (~43,000, on the road to Samsun), Alaca (~29,000, with Alacahöyük), and İskilip (~29,000, the historic timber-frame town in the northern hill country). Boğazkale in the southeast carries Hattuşa.

The province is the seat of Hitit Üniversitesi (founded 2006), named for the Hittite heritage of the country. The economy continues to balance the older agricultural-and-pastoral base (wheat, sugar beet, leblebi chickpeas, livestock) with the modern industrial zone and the steady tourism flow to Hattuşa and Alacahöyük.

viii.What to See, in Order

The walking circuit of Çorum city is small: from the central Cumhuriyet Meydanı the route runs to the Ulu Camii (14th–15th c. core, much restored), the Saat Kulesi (1896, the Hamidian-period clock tower), and the Çorum Müzesi in the converted late-Ottoman Sanayi Mektebi building — the museum holds the principal Çorum collection of Hittite finds from Alacahöyük (the originals of the sun-disc standards are mostly at Ankara, but Çorum has a substantial parallel collection), Phrygian and Roman material, and the Ottoman-period ethnographic holdings.

The principal excursions of the province are the three Hittite sites:

• Hattuşa / Boğazkale — see our Hattusha essay for the full account. Eighty kilometres southeast of Çorum city; a full day with the rock sanctuary of Yazılıkaya two kilometres outside the city walls.
• Alacahöyük — thirty-five kilometres north of Boğazkale, with the great Sphinx Gate, the Hattian royal tombs, and the small on-site museum. Often visited as the second leg of a Hattuşa day.
• Şapinuva (Ortaköy) — sixty kilometres east of Çorum city; the active excavation site is partly open to visitors and the small Ortaköy museum holds the principal finds.

The Ottoman timber-frame town of İskilip in the northern hill country — with its restored Ottoman-period houses and the small Atıf Hoca Müzesi — is the most distinguished surviving Ottoman-vernacular townscape of the province.

The hill country between the plateau and the Black Sea — Hittite Hattuşa, Hattian Alacahöyük, Şapinuva of the cuneiform archive, and the Ottoman market town of the leblebi and the copper hammers.

For the Hittite imperial capital in detail, see our Hattusha essay; for the Hittite-period framework, our planned essay on the Hittites under Civilisations; for the parallel Black Sea / central-Anatolian province to the east, see Amasya. For Türkiye's central plateau and northern hill country in the wider sense, visit our sister site CountryOfTurkey.com.