Elazığ

i.The Hazar-Murat Country and the Reservoirs

Elazığ sits on a broad upland plain in eastern Anatolia at about 1,070 metres elevation, in the country between the two great Euphrates tributaries — the Karasu (the western branch) and the Murat (the eastern branch) — that join just below the province to form the Euphrates proper. The country to the south is dominated by the deep tectonic-graben of Lake Hazar (Gölcük), the principal natural lake of eastern Anatolia at 1,248 metres elevation, set in the dramatic fault-line gorge of the East Anatolian Fault that runs the length of the province. The country to the west and north is now bordered by the great artificial reservoirs of the Keban Barajı (the principal upper-Euphrates dam) and the Karakaya Barajı (downstream), with the smaller reservoirs of Kıralkızı and Özlüce in the eastern country.

The province extends to 9,153 square kilometres and supports a population of approximately 604,000 under the TÜİK 2024 address-based registration count, organised into eleven districts: the central Merkez, and the outlying Ağın, Alacakaya, Arıcak, Baskil, Karakoçan, Keban, Kovancılar, Maden, Palu, and Sivrice. The Elazığ country is sometimes described — as the provincial tourism office puts it — as "an inland peninsula": the modern province is bounded on three sides by reservoir water (Keban to the west, Karakaya to the south, the smaller Kıralkızı to the east), and the historical settlement geography of the upper Euphrates has been profoundly reorganised by the 20th-century dam-building.

ii.Harput Kalesi — From Urartu to the Ottomans

The historic settlement of Elazığ is at Harput, the great fortress town set on a basalt ridge five kilometres north of the modern city. The site is one of the longest continuously occupied citadels in eastern Anatolia: the castle was founded by the Urartian Kingdom in the 8th century BCE, in the same period as the great Urartian fortresses of Tushpa (Van) and Toprakkale; the lower citadel and the famous 2,500-year-old water system recently uncovered in archaeological survey are of Urartian origin. The country passed in succession through Median, Achaemenid Persian, Hellenistic Seleucid, Roman, Sasanian, and Byzantine rule.

Through the long Byzantine centuries the castle was held under the thema of Mesopotamia and was, in the 10th and 11th centuries, an important frontier fortress against the Arab and Seljuk armies of the Jazira and northern Mesopotamia. The historic Armenian name of the site, Kharberd, derives from the Armenian roots khar ("stone") and berd ("fortress") — "stone fortress." The Arabic-Syriac name, Hisn Ziyad, and the Turkish name Harput, all preserve different aspects of the same medieval identity.

iii.Çubukoğulları, Artukid, and Seljuk: 1085 – 1234

The first Turkish ruler of Harput was Çubuk Bey, the founder of the Çubukoğulları Beyliği, who took the castle in 1085 in the years immediately after the Battle of Manzikert (1071) and the great Seljuk push westward. The Çubukoğulları held the country for a quarter of a century, until 1112, when Harput passed to the much more powerful Artukid (Artuklu) dynasty of the Mesopotamian-Jazira country, then expanding north from their principal bases at Hisn Kayfa (Hasankeyf), Mardin, and Diyarbakır.

Under the Artukid rulers Harput became the seat of the northern branch of the dynasty and one of the principal monumental centres of the Turkish-Islamic 12th century. The most important surviving monument of the period is the Harput Ulu Camii, built in 1156–57 by the Artukid ruler Fahreddin Kara Arslan (a Hisn Kayfa Artukid). The mosque is one of the principal Artukid-period buildings standing in eastern Anatolia: a low-slung basalt-stone structure with stone columns, the rare surviving open central courtyard (subsequently roofed in modern times to reduce heating costs), and the celebrated Eğri Minare (the Leaning Minaret), a tall brick-built minaret that has stood at a pronounced lean since the medieval centuries. The mosque is one of the principal Artukid monuments of eastern Anatolia, alongside the contemporary Artukid Ulu Camii of Diyarbakır.

In 1234 Harput passed to the Anatolian Seljuk Sultanate of Rûm under Alâeddin Keykubâd I, and through the Seljuk-Mongol centuries the country was held in succession by the Ilkhanate, the Eretnid beylik, the Dulkadirids, and from c. 1465 by the Akkoyunlu under Uzun Hasan.

iv.Akkoyunlu and the Sara Hatun Camii (1465)

Under Akkoyunlu rule Harput was the residence of Sara (Sare) Hatun, the famous mother of Uzun Hasan, the great Akkoyunlu sultan whom Mehmed II would defeat at the Battle of Otlukbeli (1473). Sara Hatun was a remarkable diplomatic figure of the 15th-century eastern Anatolian country: she negotiated with both Mehmed II and the rulers of Trebizond, and she built, at Harput in 1465, the small but elegant Sara Hatun Camii (Sarahatun Camii) that bears her name. The original wooden mosque was substantially rebuilt in 1843 by Hacı Ahmet Efendi, the Harput müftü, but the foundation date and the dedication are preserved.

The Ottoman annexation came under Yavuz Sultan Selim I, on the same eastern campaign of 1514–16 that brought Bayburt, Malatya, and the wider eastern Anatolian country into the Ottoman state. Harput was incorporated into the Ottoman Eyaleti of Diyarbekir in 1516, and the country has been continuously Ottoman-Turkish for the five centuries since.

v.The 1834 Move from Harput to Mezre

The single most important administrative change in the modern history of the country was the 1834 transfer of the provincial governor's residence from Harput, on the high basalt ridge, down to the small plains village of Mezre (also Mezere, Mezereh), five kilometres to the southwest. The change came under the centralising reform-era policies of Sultan Mahmud II and his governor Reşid Mehmed Paşa: Harput, while strategically excellent, was reached only by a steep climb and had a chronic water-supply shortage; Mezre stood on the broad alluvial plain, with abundant water, easy approach for the new wheeled traffic, and room for the modern administrative quarter.

The village grew rapidly. By 1834 the governor's konak and the principal administrative offices had moved to Mezre; through the 1830s and 1840s the new town overtook the old. By the 1860s most of Harput's commercial life had moved down to the plain, and the historic ridge town was in decline as a permanent settlement. The new town at Mezre was officially renamed Mamuretülaziz — "the well-built town of Aziz," after Sultan Abdülaziz (1861–1876) — and the sancak of Harput was elevated to the status of a vilayet in 1878/79, with the new vilayet centred on Mamuretülaziz town and including the Malatya sancak (see our Malatya essay) and the Dersim sancak (the modern Tunceli).

vi.The Mamuretülaziz Vilayeti, 1879 – 1923

Through the late Ottoman decades Mamuretülaziz was one of the principal eastern Ottoman provinces, the seat of a vilayet that covered the upper Euphrates country from the modern Tunceli to Malatya. The city was an important late-Ottoman commercial centre on the Diyarbekir-Erzurum caravan road, and the country housed substantial Armenian, Syriac, and Turkmen communities alongside the Turkish majority. The American Mission College at Harput — Euphrates College, founded by Congregationalist missionaries in 1859 — was one of the principal late-Ottoman foreign educational institutions in the eastern country.

The long Ottoman centuries closed at Mamuretülaziz, as elsewhere in the country, in the difficult conditions of the First World War and the subsequent National Struggle. The wartime relocation (tehcir) of 1915, ordered for the eastern provinces in conditions of active warfare on three fronts, was applied to the Armenian community of the Mamuretülaziz Vilayeti. The community returned in part in the brief interwar period of 1918–22, but the demographic structure of the country after 1923 was substantially different from the late Ottoman pattern.

vii.The Republic and the 1937 Renaming

Under the early Republic the city was renamed in successive simplifications. Mamuretülaziz was first shortened to Elaziz in 1921, retaining only the principal element of the old Ottoman-period name. In 1937, under the wider Republican programme of replacing Ottoman-period administrative names with new Turkish-language forms, the city and province were renamed Elazığ by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk personally — the new form was created by adding the Turkish suffix -ığ to Elaz, producing a name whose etymology was now read as "the land of Aziz" in a purely Turkish-grammatical form. The name has been Elazığ for the eight decades since.

The province was reorganised under the modern Republican administrative geography; through the second half of the 20th century the country became a substantial regional centre, with the Fırat Üniversitesi (Euphrates University, founded 1975), the modern provincial hospital, and the principal civil aviation airport for the upper-Euphrates country at Elazığ. The cuisine of the country is one of the most distinguished of eastern Anatolia: the Harput köftesi (the famous bulgur-and-meat ball of Harput, served in a tart yoghurt-and-tomato sauce), the içli köfte, the turşu kavurması, and the famous Elazığ Öküzgözü wine — one of the principal indigenous-grape wines of Türkiye, produced from the famous Öküzgözü ("ox-eye") grape that takes its name from the size of its dark-blue berries.

viii.The Keban Project and the Reservoir Country (1966–1974)

The single most consequential intervention in the modern geography of the province was the Keban Project — the great upper-Euphrates dam built at the village of Keban, 60 kilometres northwest of Elazığ city, between 1966 and 1974. The Keban Barajı, completed in 1974 and inaugurated by Süleyman Demirel, is one of the principal hydroelectric facilities of Türkiye and the largest reservoir on the upper Euphrates above the later Atatürk Barajı (1990). The reservoir, at full capacity, extends to 675 square kilometres and holds 30.6 billion cubic metres of water — drowning the deep gorge country of the Euphrates upstream from Keban for some 125 kilometres.

The Keban Project displaced approximately 30,000 people from at least 212 villages in the deep-gorge country between Elazığ and Tunceli. The pre-flood archaeological-rescue programme of 1968–74, organised by the Middle East Technical University and the Türk Tarih Kurumu, was one of the principal large-scale salvage-archaeology programmes in the history of Türkiye; the principal finds, including the Late-Bronze-Age cemetery at Norşuntepe and the Urartian metalwork from Aşvan Kale, are today held in the Elazığ Müzesi.

The Keban Project began a longer programme of upper-Euphrates dam-building that would continue through the second half of the 20th century: the Karakaya Barajı (downstream, 1976–87), the Atatürk Barajı (further downstream, 1983–90; see our Şanlıurfa essay), and the smaller Kıralkızı (1980) and Özlüce (1990s) dams in the eastern country. The cumulative effect has been the comprehensive reshaping of the upper Euphrates from a great river through deep gorges into a chain of large artificial lakes — the modern reservoir country in which the Elazığ peninsula sits.

ix.The 2020 Sivrice and 2023 Kahramanmaraş Earthquakes

Elazığ lies on the East Anatolian Fault, one of the principal active tectonic features of Türkiye, and the province has been affected by two large earthquakes in the recent period.

The 24 January 2020 Sivrice earthquake (Mw 6.7, at 20:55 local time, with epicentre at the village of Sivrice on Lake Hazar) killed 41 people and injured over 1,600; nineteen towns and over two hundred villages were seriously affected in Elazığ and the neighbouring Malatya and Diyarbakır provinces. The earthquake was the strongest single tremor on the East Anatolian Fault since 1971, and it triggered the comprehensive reassessment of the seismic hazard along the fault zone — including the recognition that the central segment, from Sivrice southwest toward Kahramanmaraş, was loaded with substantial unreleased strain.

That strain was released three years later in the Kahramanmaraş earthquake sequence of 6 February 2023 (see our Kahramanmaraş essay). Elazığ was among the eleven provinces declared in the affected zone, though the damage in Elazığ was substantially lighter than in Malatya, Hatay, and Kahramanmaraş further south. The province had, since 2020, been under continuing seismic-readiness reconstruction, and the worst late-2010s building stock had been largely replaced. Damaged building stock in Sivrice, Maden, and the central Merkez district remains under continuing remediation.

x.Harput on the UNESCO Tentative List

The historic city of Harput — the great basalt-ridge town that was the original Elazığ — was placed on the UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List in 2018, with a nomination centred on the long continuous-occupation history from Urartu to the Ottomans, the surviving 12th-century Artukid monuments (the Ulu Camii of 1156, the Sara Hatun Camii of 1465), and the wider monumental landscape of the basalt ridge. The Harput site comprises the castle itself; the Ulu Camii and the famous Eğri Minare; the Sara Hatun Camii; the 13th-century Arap Baba Türbesi (with the celebrated mummified body of the local Sufi saint, traditionally dated to the Ilkhanid period); the Kurşunlu Camii; the small Ottoman bazaar quarter; and the surviving Armenian and Syriac church remains. The site is open as a free-access open-air archaeological zone, with the Elazığ Müzesi serving as the principal interpretation centre.

xi.What to See, in Order

The principal first visit in Elazığ is to Harput — the great basalt-ridge town five kilometres north of the modern city, reached by a short, steep climb from the Elazığ plain. The compact walking circuit at Harput covers the castle (Harput Kalesi) and its commanding panorama over the upper-Euphrates country; the Harput Ulu Camii of 1156–57 with the leaning Eğri Minare; the Sara Hatun Camii of 1465; the Arap Baba Türbesi; the Kurşunlu Camii; the small Ottoman bazaar quarter; and the visitor centre with the Urartian-period water-system display. The principal regional collection is housed at the Elazığ Müzesi in the modern city, with the Keban salvage-archaeology material as its centrepiece.

The wider province offers Lake Hazar (the dramatic East-Anatolian-Fault graben lake, with the small island of Kilise Adası and the submerged ruins of the medieval Armenian monastery of St Tovma); the Buzluk Mağarası (the Ice Cave, with year-round ice formations) at Sivrice; the Keban Barajı overlook with the views over the great reservoir; the historic Palu Kalesi in the east (an Urartian-Byzantine castle in the deep Murat-river canyon, with the rare surviving Urartian rock-cut tomb and the spectacular ribbon of the river below); the historic copper-mining town of Maden; and the wine country of Baskil, where the principal Öküzgözü vineyards of the Kavaklıdere and Diren wine-houses produce one of the principal indigenous Turkish wines.

From Urartu's basalt ridge to the great reservoir country of the upper Euphrates — the Artukid Ulu Camii, the Akkoyunlu Sara Hatun, and the Keban dam that reshaped the river.

For the parent Mamuretülaziz Vilayeti, see Malatya (the principal southern sancak of the old vilayet); for the eastern Dersim sancak, see the planned Tunceli essay; for the Artukid contemporaries, see Diyarbakır; for the downstream upper-Euphrates reservoir country, see Şanlıurfa; for the parallel 2023-earthquake provinces, see Malatya, Kahramanmaraş, Hatay. For more on the eastern country of Türkiye, visit our sister site CountryOfTurkey.com.