Erzurum

i.The Highest Plateau and the Three Rivers

Erzurum sits at 1,890 metres above the sea, on the broad eastern Anatolian high plateau — the highest of any provincial capital in Türkiye. The plateau here is a meeting of watersheds: north of the city, the small rivers run toward the Çoruh and the Black Sea; east, toward the Aras, which carries them to the Caspian; south, the springs of the Karasu branch of the Euphrates rise and run to the Persian Gulf. The country is open, windswept, and severe. The winters last from October to April; recorded temperatures regularly fall below minus 30 degrees Celsius. The city is ringed by mountains — Palandöken to the south (3,176 m), Dumlu to the north — and the long high pasture-land that has supported the eastern Anatolian pastoral economy since the Iron Age.

The province is one of the largest in Türkiye — 25,066 km², the fourth largest after Konya, Sivas, and Ankara — and one of the most thinly populated. Its high pastures produce the dairy, the cured meats (cağ kebabı, kadayıf dolması), and the wool that characterise the regional kitchen and economy.

ii.Theodosiopolis — the Byzantine Foundation (415–422 CE)

The historic-period city on this site was founded by the eastern Roman emperor Theodosius II between 415 and 422 CE as the fortified frontier centre of Theodosiopolis, on the road from Trebizond into the upper Euphrates. The name was a deliberate echo of the wider Theodosian programme of eastern fortification against the Sasanian Persian frontier; Theodosiopolis sat directly on that frontier, and was for the next two centuries the principal Byzantine military post in the Armenian theatre. The city walls — substantially rebuilt by Justinian I in the 6th century and again by the Macedonian emperors in the 10th — formed the kernel of the modern Erzurum citadel (the Erzurum Kalesi) that still anchors the city centre.

iii.From the Arab Capture to Manzikert (653–1071)

Theodosiopolis fell to an Arab army in 653 CE, only twenty years after the death of the Prophet, in the first wave of Islamic expansion into the highland country. Through the next four centuries the city changed hands repeatedly between Byzantine, Arab, and Armenian-Bagratid rulers — held briefly by the Byzantines in the 9th and 10th centuries, returned to Arab rule under various emirs, and finally consolidated under the eastern Anatolian frontier governors of the late Byzantine period. The name evolved in this period from the Greek Theodosiopolis through the Arabic Qālīqalā, the Armenian Karin, and the Persian Erzen — the last of which, after the Seljuk capture, would become the modern Erzurum.

The decisive change came with the Battle of Manzikert on 26 August 1071 — fought sixty kilometres south of the modern city of Muş, but the centre of gravity of which was Erzurum — when the Seljuk Sultan Alparslan defeated the Byzantine emperor Romanos IV Diogenes and opened all of eastern Anatolia to Turkish settlement. The original town of Erzen, southeast of modern Erzurum, was abandoned shortly after the battle; the population resettled within the walls of Theodosiopolis, which from then on carried the compound name Erzen-i Rûm — "the Erzen of (Byzantine) Anatolia" — to distinguish it from another, southern Erzen near modern Bitlis. Over the centuries the name shortened to Erzurum.

iv.The Saltuqids and the Seljuk Period (c. 1080–1201)

The first Turkish dynasty to rule Erzurum was the Saltuqids (or Saltuklular), a small Turkmen beylik founded around 1080 by Ebülkâsım Saltuk — one of the emirs who had accompanied Alparslan at Manzikert — and centred on the city. The Saltuqids held Erzurum and the surrounding country for some 120 years, through the late 11th and 12th centuries, until they were absorbed into the Anatolian Seljuk Sultanate of Rûm by Süleyman Şah II in 1201. Under the Saltuqids and their Seljuk successors Erzurum was a major centre of the trans-Anatolian caravan trade between Tabriz and the Black Sea ports, and one of the great architectural centres of the period.

v.The Three Tombs and the Çifte Minareli Medrese

The architectural legacy of the Saltuqid and Seljuk centuries is the densest concentration of 13th-century stone monuments in eastern Anatolia. The three principal complexes stand within five minutes of each other on the slope below the citadel. The Ulu Cami (the Great Mosque, 1179) is a Saltuqid foundation, with a forest of stone piers under a flat timber-and-mud roof — one of the earliest of the great congregational mosques of Anatolian Turkish architecture. The Çifte Minareli Medrese ("the Medrese of the Twin Minarets," also called the Hatuniye Medresesi) was probably built between 1285 and 1290 under Ilkhanid rule — possibly endowed by Hüdâvend Hatun, daughter of the Anatolian Seljuk sultan Alâeddin Keykubad I; its great twin-minareted portal, in honey-coloured tufa with cut-stone relief of vegetal and geometric ornament, is among the most famous architectural images of Türkiye. The Üç Kümbetler ("the Three Tombs," 13th century) — three small, conical-roofed mausoleums of the Saltuqid period, standing together in an open meadow on the southern edge of the old city — are the principal surviving Saltuqid monuments. The standard architectural reference is Oktay Aslanapa's Turkish Art and Architecture (Praeger, 1971).

vi.The Mongol and Ottoman Centuries

After the Seljuk collapse at Köse Dağ in 1243, Erzurum passed under the suzerainty of the Ilkhanid Mongols for a century, and then through a succession of small post-Mongol principalities — the Eretnids, the Akkoyunlu, the Karakoyunlu — before falling to the Safavid Persian empire of Şah İsmail in the early 16th century. The Ottoman annexation came in 1515, the year after Sultan Selim I defeated the Safavids at the battle of Çaldıran (1514, in modern Van province; see our Van essay). Erzurum became the centre of a major eastern frontier province (the Erzurum Eyaleti), and through the long Ottoman centuries served as the principal Ottoman administrative and military centre of eastern Anatolia.

vii.The Russo-Turkish Wars of the 19th Century

The long, slow Russian advance into the Caucasus through the 19th century made Erzurum, repeatedly, a front-line city. Russian forces took the city for the first time in 1829, during the Russo-Turkish War of 1828–29; the Treaty of Edirne returned it. They took it again in 1878, during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78; the Treaty of Berlin returned it. The pattern was the same in both wars: Russian armies pushed across the Caucasus passes, seized Erzurum, were halted by Ottoman counter-attacks or by European diplomatic intervention, and withdrew under the resulting peace treaties. The standard scholarly synthesis is Virginia Aksan's Ottoman Wars 1700–1870: An Empire Besieged (Routledge, 2007).

viii.The First World War and the 1916–18 Russian Occupation

The same pattern returned in the First World War, on a larger scale. The Caucasus campaign opened in late 1914; the Ottoman 3rd Army's disastrous winter offensive at Sarıkamış (December 1914 – January 1915) opened the eastern front, and through 1915 the Russian Caucasus Army advanced steadily westward across the high plateau. Russian forces took Erzurum on 16 February 1916 after a two-week assault on the surrounding fortifications. The city remained under Russian military administration for two years.

The Russian collapse following the October Revolution and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918) opened the way for the Turkish recovery. Erzurum was retaken by Ottoman forces under Vehib Paşa on 12 March 1918; the date is observed annually in the city as Erzurum'un Kurtuluşu, the Liberation of Erzurum. The wider population shifts of the WWI period substantially altered the demography of the province; the Republic that emerged in 1923 inherited a population that was, in its eastern Anatolian provinces, smaller and more uniformly Muslim than the late-Ottoman population had been.

ix.The Erzurum Congress (23 July – 7 August 1919)

The single most important event of the modern city's history is the Erzurum Kongresi, the first of the great regional congresses of the National Struggle, held in Erzurum from 23 July to 7 August 1919. Mustafa Kemal Paşa — newly arrived in Anatolia from İstanbul on 19 May 1919 (see our Samsun essay) and inland through Havza, Amasya (the Circular of 22 June 1919), and Sivas — convened the congress in his capacity as honorary president of the eastern provinces' Defence of National Rights (Müdâfaa-i Hukuk) committees. He resigned his Ottoman army commission on the day before the congress opened, and was elected its chairman.

The Erzurum Congress's Beyanname (declaration) of 7 August 1919 set out, for the first time, the foundational principles of the National Struggle: that the homeland within its national boundaries was indivisible, that any foreign occupation would be resisted, and that a national assembly would be summoned to represent the people's will. The decisions taken at Erzurum were carried forward — under Mustafa Kemal's chairmanship — to the wider national Sivas Congress of 4–11 September 1919. The school building in which the congress met (now the Atatürk Üniversitesi Atatürk Evi ve Müzesi) is preserved as a museum.

x.The Republic and the Modern Province

Republican Erzurum grew slowly. The Sivas–Erzurum railway, completed in 1939, gave the city a working connection to the central plateau. Atatürk Üniversitesi, founded in 1957 as the first university east of Ankara, anchored the modern city's intellectual life. Under the TÜİK 2024 address-based registration count the province population was approximately 736,900; the metropolitan municipality covers twenty districts. The three central districts — Yakutiye (the historic core, ~189,000), Palandöken (the modern southern suburb under the mountain, ~182,000), and Aziziye (the western extension, ~72,000) — together carry just under half the provincial population.

The city is also the principal winter-sports centre of eastern Türkiye. The Palandöken ski resort, on the northern slope of the mountain immediately south of the city, was the principal venue of the 2011 Winter Universiade hosted by Erzurum, and is — together with Uludağ and Erciyes — one of the three major ski destinations in the country.

xi.What to See, in Order

The walking shape of historic Erzurum runs across a single slope. From the central Cumhuriyet Caddesi the route runs east to the Erzurum Kalesi (the citadel, Byzantine-Saltuqid), with the small Saat Kulesi (clock tower) on its highest bastion. Just below, the Ulu Cami (1179) and the great Çifte Minareli Medrese (c. 1285–90) stand within a few minutes of each other on the central avenue. Further down the slope are the Üç Kümbetler (the Three Tombs, 13th century) in their open meadow, and — on the same axis — the Yakutiye Medresesi (1310, Ilkhanid period), now the Türk-İslâm Eserleri ve Etnografya Müzesi. The Atatürk Evi — the 1919 Congress building — is in the modern central district to the west.

For the wider province, the principal excursion is south to the Tortum waterfalls and the Çoruh gorge (130 km north of the city), and to the medieval Bagratid Georgian-Armenian rock-cut churches of Bana, Tortum, and İşhan in Yusufeli (now in Artvin province, but accessible from Erzurum). The Palandöken ski centre is a 10-minute drive from the city centre.

The eastern Anatolian capital of the high plateau — Theodosiopolis, Erzen-i Rûm, Saltuqid Erzurum — and the city where the principles of the National Struggle were first declared, on 7 August 1919.

For the 19 May 1919 landing that began the National Struggle, see Samsun; for the national congress that followed Erzurum, see Sivas; for the eastern Anatolian frontier and the 1071 victory, see Van and the Seljuks of Rûm. For Türkiye's eastern geography in the wider sense, visit our sister site CountryOfTurkey.com.