Erzincan

i.The Erzincan Plain and the Upper Karasu

Erzincan sits on one of the most spectacular geographical sites in Türkiye: a long, broad, flat alluvial plain at 1,185 metres elevation, fifty kilometres long and ten kilometres wide, fully enclosed by mountain walls on every side. The plain is the upland basin of the Karasu (the western Euphrates), which enters the country from the high Erzurum plateau in the east, runs the length of the plain, and exits through the deep gorge country in the west toward its junction with the Murat (the eastern Euphrates) at Keban. The country to the north is closed by the Kop Dağları and the Otlukbeli range; the country to the south by the spectacular Munzur and Mercan mountains that separate Erzincan from Tunceli.

The province extends to 11,815 square kilometres and supports a population of approximately 239,000 under the TÜİK 2024 address-based registration count, organised into nine districts: the central Merkez (~166,000), Tercan, Üzümlü, Refahiye, Çayırlı, İliç, Kemah, Kemaliye, and Otlukbeli. The country sits on one of the most seismically active stretches of the North Anatolian Fault: the great strike-slip line that runs the length of northern Türkiye terminates, in its eastern segment, immediately under the Erzincan basin, and the province has been twice substantially destroyed in the past century by earthquakes on this fault.

ii.From Akilisene to Erzen-i Rûm

The Erzincan country first enters the classical record as the country of Akilisene (or Acilisene), the upper-Karasu basin of late-Hellenistic and Roman geographic writing, mentioned by Strabo, Plutarch, and Tacitus. Through the Roman and Byzantine centuries the principal town of the country was at the small site of Keltzene (Greek Κελτζηνή), the seat of an early Christian bishopric. The country was part of Roman Armenia Minor, then of the Byzantine theme of Mesopotamia, and through the early-medieval centuries was a frontier zone between the Byzantine empire and the Arab and Sasanian states to the east.

The modern town of Erzincan was founded — or refounded on an earlier site — in the late Byzantine centuries, with the Greek name Aziris or Eriza. Through the long Arab-Byzantine wars the country was held by the Byzantines, the Abbasids, the Saltukids, and the Mengüceks in succession. The Turkish name Erzincan is the long evolution of the Persian-Arabic Erzen-i Rûm form — "the Erzen of the Romans," the western (Byzantine-Roman) Erzen, as distinguished from the eastern Erzen-i Rûm that became modern Erzurum (see our Erzurum essay). The two names share an etymological root in the medieval town of Erzen (modern Karaz, between the two cities).

iii.The Mengücek Beyliği (1071–1228)

The decisive Turkish conquest of the country came after the Battle of Manzikert in 1071. The Seljuk commander Mengücek Ahmet Gazi, one of the principal officers of Alparslan, was granted the upper-Karasu country together with Kemah, Divriği, and Şebinkarahisar (the modern Giresun inland district) as a heritable beylik. The Mengücek Beyliği — one of the four great post-Manzikert Anatolian beyliks alongside the Saltukids of Erzurum, the Danishmendids of Sivas, and the Artukids of Mardin-Diyarbakır — was based at Erzincan for the long century-and-a-half of its existence.

Under the Mengücek rulers Erzincan became one of the principal Turkish-Islamic monumental centres of the eastern country. The two principal surviving Mengücek monuments are not in Erzincan itself — the city's medieval monuments were destroyed in the long sequence of Erzincan earthquakes — but in the neighbouring countries: the Divriği Ulu Camii of 1228 (see our planned Sivas essay, since Divriği today is a Sivas district), inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1985 as one of the greatest Anatolian-Turkish monumental buildings; and the Kemah Melik Gazi Kümbeti, the great octagonal tomb of the Mengücek founder in the small town of Kemah immediately downstream from Erzincan.

The Mengücek country split, c. 1142, into two branches: the western (Divriği) branch and the eastern (Erzincan-Kemah) branch. The Erzincan branch was incorporated into the Anatolian Seljuk Sultanate of Rûm by Alâeddin Keykubâd I in 1228 — the same year that the great Divriği Ulu Camii was being completed by the western branch — and the eastern Mengücek territory became part of the wider Seljuk state.

iv.Mama Hatun of Tercan (1191–1200)

The single most remarkable medieval figure of the Erzincan country is Melike Mama Hatun (also Mâme Hatun), the female ruler of the Saltukid dynasty who governed the eastern part of the wider Erzurum-Erzincan country from 1191 to 1200. Mama Hatun was the daughter of the great Saltukid prince Saltuk II and the sister of the last Saltukid ruler Melikşah; she succeeded her brother as the principal authority of the eastern Saltukid country, and she is one of only a handful of named female rulers in the medieval Anatolian-Turkish historical record.

Her principal surviving monument is the great Mama Hatun Külliyesi at modern Mamahatun town in Tercan district, fifty kilometres east of Erzincan on the upper Tuzla Su (a tributary of the Karasu). The complex, built in the closing years of the 12th century, comprises four monumental elements arranged in a tight architectural set:

• The Mama Hatun Kümbeti — the famous cylindrical-on-octagonal-base tomb of the queen herself, with the rare surviving 12th-century carved-stone-tracery exterior and the upper conical cap. The interior holds the cenotaphs of Mama Hatun and her immediate household.
• The Mama Hatun Camii — a small mosque of the same period.
• The Mama Hatun Hamamı — a Saltukid-period public bath.
• The Mama Hatun Kervansarayı — the great rectangular caravanserai with its principal hall and arched gateway, built to serve the Erzurum-Erzincan caravan road.

The Mama Hatun complex is one of the most important Saltukid-period architectural ensembles surviving in eastern Türkiye, and one of the few major medieval monuments anywhere in the world directly associated with a named female sovereign.

v.Seljuk, Mongol, Eretnid: 1228 – 1402

The Seljuk Erzincan of the 13th century was one of the principal commercial and intellectual centres of the eastern country, mentioned by Marco Polo (1271) as a substantial Christian-Muslim town with substantial silk-weaving and metalwork industries. After the Battle of Köse Dağı (26 June 1243) — which was fought in the western Erzincan country — the Anatolian Seljuk Sultanate of Rûm became a Mongol tributary, and through the late 13th and 14th centuries the country was held in succession by the Ilkhanate, the Eretnid beylik centred at Sivas-Kayseri, and the Kadı Burhâneddîn principality.

The most catastrophic interruption in the medieval history of the city was Timur's sack in 1401–02, during his great Anatolian campaign that culminated at the Battle of Ankara (28 July 1402). The Timurid devastation of Erzincan was, in the long arc of the city's history, one of the largest single demographic blows the country sustained before the 1939 earthquake.

vi.Akkoyunlu, Otlukbeli (1473), Ottoman Annexation (1514)

The country was held by the Akkoyunlu (White Sheep Turkmen) federation from 1455, when their great sultan Uzun Hasan took Erzincan and ordered the rebuilding of the citadel. The decisive end of Akkoyunlu power came at the Battle of Otlukbeli on 11 August 1473 — the field of which lies in the modern Otlukbeli district of Erzincan province, in the country between Erzincan and Bayburt. Mehmed the Conqueror's Ottoman army defeated Uzun Hasan's Akkoyunlu force decisively, and the wider eastern Anatolian country passed into the Ottoman sphere of influence — though the formal annexation of Erzincan to the Ottoman state would not come until forty-one years later.

The brief Safavid Persian interlude began in 1502, when Shah Ismail I made Erzincan one of his northern headquarters. The Ottoman conquest came on the great 1514 campaign of Sultan Selim I (Yavuz): after the Ottoman victory at the Battle of Çaldıran (23 August 1514) in modern Van province (see our Van essay), the sultan granted Erzincan, together with Bayburt, to the Ottoman commander Bıyıklı Mehmet Paşa on 23 October 1514. The country has been continuously Ottoman-Turkish for the five centuries since.

vii.The Late Ottoman and Early Republican Decades

Through the long Ottoman centuries Erzincan was a working sancak of the great Erzurum Eyaleti, on the principal Trabzon-Erzurum-Tabriz caravan road. The town was substantially destroyed by the 1784 earthquake (one of the long sequence of large North-Anatolian-Fault tremors on the Erzincan basin) and rebuilt; it was occupied by Russian forces during the 1916–1918 period of the First World War (recovered on 13 February 1918) and again during the National Struggle. The long Ottoman centuries closed at Erzincan, as elsewhere in the wider Erzurum vilayet, in the difficult conditions of the First World War and its aftermath; 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 Erzurum Vilayeti, of which Erzincan was part.

Under the early Republic Erzincan was reorganised as a province of the new state. The 13th of February (Kurtuluş Günü) is observed as the city's day of liberation from the WWI Russian occupation.

viii.The Great 1939 Earthquake

The single most consequential event in the modern history of Erzincan, and one of the most catastrophic single events in the history of the Republic of Türkiye, is the great earthquake of 27 December 1939.

The earthquake struck at 01:57:23 local time on 27 December 1939, with an estimated moment magnitude of Mw 7.8 and a maximum Mercalli intensity of XII (Extreme) — the highest level on the scale. The epicentre was located on the great northern strand of the North Anatolian Fault, twenty kilometres northeast of Erzincan; the fault ruptured for some 340 kilometres along the strike, between Erzincan in the east and Niksar (in modern Tokat province) in the west. The earthquake remains the second-deadliest natural disaster in the history of the Republic of Türkiye (after the 6 February 2023 Kahramanmaraş sequence), and the deadliest single-event tremor of the 20th century:

• 32,968 deaths (the official Türkiye Cumhuriyeti figure; initial reports gave 8,000 on the day, 20,000 on 28 December, and the final figure was reached by 5 January 1940);
• ~100,000 injured;
• 116,720 buildings damaged or destroyed across the affected zone.

The disaster was compounded by extreme weather: temperatures fell to –30 °C in the hours after the tremor, and blizzard conditions and subsequent flooding through the night and the following days substantially raised the casualty count from cold and exposure. The city of Erzincan was almost completely destroyed; the modern Republic of Türkiye's first major civil-engineering disaster-response programme was organised by the government of İsmet İnönü in the early weeks of 1940, with American Red Cross and international relief participation. The American technical-knowledge transfer arising from the 1939 disaster — the new emphasis on earthquake-resistant building codes, the work of the American engineers in the reconstruction — was an important episode in the wider history of 20th-century Turkish-American technical co-operation.

The modern Erzincan was completely rebuilt on a slightly shifted plain — south of the original 1939 site — through the 1940s and 1950s, with the new grid-plan layout and the new building stock conforming to the post-1939 earthquake code.

ix.The 13 March 1992 Earthquake

The second great Erzincan earthquake of the modern era struck at 17:18 local time on 13 March 1992, with a moment magnitude of Mw 6.6–6.7. The 1992 earthquake was substantially smaller than 1939, but the modern Erzincan — rebuilt under the post-1939 code — still suffered substantial damage:

• 541 deaths in the immediate aftermath, with the official final figure given as 653;
• ~3,850 injured;
• 8,057 to 12,000 buildings destroyed or damaged.

The 1992 disaster forced a second reconstruction of the central districts and a renewed emphasis on the seismic-readiness of public buildings. The Erzincan earthquake of 1992 was one of the principal case studies that informed the modern Turkish earthquake code of 2007 (TBDY 2007) and its successor TBDY 2018.

x.The Modern Province

The modern Erzincan province sits on the great Erzincan basin and the surrounding valley country of the upper Karasu. The provincial economy rests on agriculture (the famous Üzümlü vineyards, the upland barley and wheat fields, the substantial honey and apicultural country of Çayırlı and Refahiye), a small but persistent traditional copper- and silver-craft sector, the substantial 21st-century gold-mining country of İliç (with the famous Çöpler mine, the principal operating gold mine in Türkiye), and a developing tourism industry centred on the Mama Hatun complex at Tercan, the historic town of Kemaliye-Eğin, and the spectacular Munzur and Mercan mountain country south of the city.

The province is the seat of Erzincan Binali Yıldırım Üniversitesi (founded 1976 as Erzincan University, renamed in 2018 after the Erzincan-born former prime minister), one of the principal universities of eastern Anatolia. The city is the centre of the upper-Karasu country and one of the principal Republican-era earthquake-built modern Anatolian cities.

xi.What to See, in Order

The principal first visit in Erzincan is to Tercan, fifty kilometres east of the city, where the great Mama Hatun Külliyesi stands as the central monumental ensemble of the province — the famous cylindrical-on-octagonal kümbet of the Saltukid female ruler, the small mosque, the Saltukid hamam, and the great rectangular caravanserai with its arched gateway. The site is open all year; the museum interpretation centre opened in 2012.

At Kemah, thirty kilometres west of the city in the deep Karasu gorge country, stands the Mengücek Melik Gazi Kümbeti — the great octagonal tomb of the Mengücek founder Mengücek Ahmet Gazi, one of the principal Mengücek-period monuments still standing — together with the small Kemah castle on the rock above the Karasu and the historic Kemah Ulu Camii.

The historic small town of Kemaliye (formerly Eğin), in the deep Karasu gorge country at the western edge of the province, is one of the best-preserved 19th-century Ottoman-Anatolian historic towns in Türkiye, with its surviving stone konaks, the small covered bazaar, and the spectacular ribbon of the Karasu running through the gorge below. Kemaliye is on the UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List as one of the principal candidate Ottoman-period historic towns of the country.

The wider province offers the spectacular Karanlık Kanyon (Dark Canyon) of the Karasu west of Kemaliye, with the principal scenic train ride on the Sivas-Erzincan railway through the gorge; the Cimin Üzümü vineyards of Üzümlü district (one of the principal indigenous-grape wine countries of eastern Anatolia); the Girlevik Şelalesi waterfalls; and the deep Munzur and Mercan mountain country south of the city, with the headwaters of the Munzur river (see our planned Tunceli essay) and one of the most striking endemic-flora reserves in eastern Türkiye.

The Mengücek capital on the upper Karasu — Mama Hatun's Tercan kümbet, Bıyıklı Mehmet Paşa's 1514 beylerbeylik, and the great 1939 earthquake that remade the city.

For the contemporary Saltukid country, see Erzurum (the parent western Saltukid capital); for the parallel Mengücek western branch, see the planned Divriği section in Sivas; for the parallel Anatolian beyliks, see Diyarbakır (Artukid); for the eastern Mengücek monumental tradition, see Giresun (the Şebinkarahisar inland district). For more on the great rivers and the eastern country of Türkiye, visit our sister site CountryOfTurkey.com.