Eskişehir

i.The Porsuk Valley and the Phrygian Plateau

Eskişehir sits in the broad alluvial valley of the Porsuk Çayı, a tributary of the Sakarya that runs through the city centre westward to join its parent river above the Sakarya gorge. The valley is the natural east-west corridor across the northwestern corner of the Anatolian plateau, and the country south of the city — the Dağlık Frigya ("highland Phrygia") — rises in low limestone hills cut by gorges and pocked with the rock-cut tombs of the Iron Age Phrygians. Eskişehir itself is at 790 metres, lower than the cities of the deep plateau, and its climate (warm summers, cold but not extreme winters) is the gentler of the central Anatolian patterns.

The city's modern character is shaped by three things: the Porsuk, which gives it an unusually green and water-defined urban core for a central Anatolian city; the meerschaum deposits, which made it the world capital of pipe-making in the 19th century; and the long railway corridor through which the Ankara–Istanbul line and the Berlin–Baghdad railway both pass.

ii.Phrygian Dorylaion (at Şarhöyük)

The historic-period city on this site was the Phrygian town the Greek sources call Dorylaion (Latin Dorylaeum), located not at the modern city centre but at the mound now called Şarhöyük, three kilometres northeast of Eskişehir, on the right bank of the Porsuk. Excavations conducted by Turkish teams since 1989 have established that the mound was continuously occupied from the early Bronze Age (c. 3000 BCE) through the Iron Age Phrygian period (c. 1100–600 BCE) and into Hellenistic and Roman times. The Phrygian-period name Dorylaion is recorded in Greek sources from the 6th century BCE onward, and is attached in late tradition to a legendary founder Doryleos of the Greek city of Eretria.

The wider Phrygian country south and southeast of Eskişehir is one of the most archaeologically distinctive zones of Türkiye. The Dağlık Frigya region — covered for tourism purposes by a designated "Phrygian Way" walking route — contains the great rock-cut monuments of the 7th and 6th centuries BCE, including the so-called Midas Monument (Yazılıkaya) southwest of Sivrihisar — a tomb chamber framed in a great relief carved with the gabled façade of a Phrygian temple, with a long Old-Phrygian-script inscription naming the deceased.

iii.Roman and Byzantine Dorylaeum — the Hot Springs

Under the Romans, Dorylaeum was a substantial city of the province of Asia, famous in antiquity for its hot springs (the modern Eskişehir kaplıcaları, still in use), for its position on the great trans-Anatolian road from Constantinople to Antioch, and for the marble quarries of nearby Dokimeion (modern İscehisar, in Afyon province — see our Afyonkarahisar essay). Through the Byzantine centuries Dorylaeum was a major garrison town and a frequent muster point for imperial armies campaigning into Anatolia. After the Arab raids of the 7th to 10th centuries the city contracted; by the 11th century it had moved off the mound at Şarhöyük to a more defensible site near the hot springs.

iv.The Battles of Dorylaeum (1097, 1147)

Dorylaeum gave its name to two of the major battles of the Crusader period. The First Battle of Dorylaeum on 1 July 1097 was the largest pitched engagement of the First Crusade: the army of the Seljuk Sultan of Rûm, Kılıçarslan I, ambushed the leading division of the Crusader column at dawn on the plain north of the city, but the Crusaders held until their main force arrived; the Seljuks withdrew with heavy losses. The battle is described in detail in the contemporary Crusader and Byzantine sources, and is the basis of much modern scholarship — including Thomas Asbridge's The First Crusade: A New History (Oxford UP, 2004).

The Second Battle of Dorylaeum, on 25 October 1147, was a Seljuk victory. The German army of the Second Crusade under Conrad III of Hohenstaufen was ambushed here by Seljuk forces under Mes'ud I; the German column was almost annihilated, and the survivors retreated to Nicaea. The defeat at Dorylaeum effectively ended German participation in the Second Crusade.

v.Seljuk and Ottoman Eskişehir

By the late 12th century the city had a substantial Turkmen population. Through the late Seljuk and Beylik periods (12th–13th centuries) it was passed between the Seljuk sultanate, the small Germiyanoğulları beylik to the south, and briefly the Byzantine Nicene state. The Ottomans acquired it around 1289 under the founder Osman Bey, and from the early 14th century it was a sancak of the Ottoman state. Its modern name, Eskişehir — "the old city" — first appears in Ottoman documents of the 14th century, contrasting the old Byzantine settlement around the hot springs with a newer Turkish quarter to its west. The two settlements gradually fused into the modern city.

vi.Yunus Emre — the Anatolian Mystical Poet

The province is the birthplace of the most widely read of all Anatolian Turkish mystical poets: Yunus Emre, born — according to the local and standard scholarly tradition — in 1240 at the village of Sarıköy, between the modern Eskişehir districts of Mihalıççık and Sivrihisar. Yunus lived through the final years of the Anatolian Seljuk state and the founding decades of the Ottoman, and he died at Sarıköy in 1320. His Divan — the collection of his Turkish-language mystical lyrics, transmitted orally for two centuries before its first written compilation in the 15th — is the foundational literary monument of vernacular Turkish, in language that has remained more accessible to ordinary readers than that of any other classical Turkish poet.

The tomb-shrine attributed to Yunus Emre at Sarıköy was rebuilt in the 1970s; the surrounding small museum (the Yunus Emre Müzesi) is administered by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. The year 2021 was designated by UNESCO and the Republic of Türkiye as the "Yunus Emre and Turkish Language Year" on the 700th anniversary of the poet's death. The standard modern scholarly biography is Talat Halman's Yunus Emre and His Mystical Poetry (Indiana University Press, 1989).

vii.The Meerschaum (Lületaşı) Trade

Eskişehir has, for at least two centuries, been the world's principal source of meerschaum — the soft, white, mineral known to mineralogists as sepiolite (a hydrous magnesium silicate), found in commercial quantity nowhere else on this scale. The local Turkish name is lületaşı, "pipe-stone." The mineral occurs as irregular nodules in the alluvial deposits of the Porsuk valley, and is mined by shaft from depths of forty to sixty metres in a small area around the villages of Sepetçi and Kozlubel southwest of the city.

Since the 18th century the principal use of meerschaum has been the carving of tobacco pipes. The mineral cuts easily when wet, then hardens; it also acquires a characteristic golden-brown patina as it absorbs the tar of long use. From roughly 1850 to 1930 the meerschaum pipe trade was the economic backbone of the city; the Eskişehir Lületaşı Müzesi at Odunpazarı holds a substantial collection of carved pipes, including the elaborate figure-pipes of the Vienna and Eskişehir workshops. The trade has contracted with the decline of pipe smoking but the workshops in the old quarter still produce.

viii.The Late Ottoman Railway City

Eskişehir's modern shape was given by the railway. The Anatolian Railway (Anadolu Demiryolu), the German-built line from İstanbul to Ankara, reached Eskişehir in 1892; the city became the principal junction of the central plateau, with branch lines to Konya (1896) and onward to Aleppo and Baghdad in the great Berlin–Baghdad Railway programme of the 1900s. The railway carried migrant populations — Turkish and Muslim refugees from the Balkans and the Caucasus, settled here by the Ottoman state in the 1880s through the 1910s — that rebuilt the city's demography, and brought with them the German railway-and-engineering workshops that would become, under the Republic, the TÜLOMSAŞ locomotive factory.

ix.The Occupation of 1920–22 and the Liberation

Eskişehir's strategic position on the railway placed it at the centre of the Greco-Turkish War. The city was occupied by Greek forces in July 1921 following the Ottoman defeats at the First and Second Battles of İnönü (the modern town of İnönü is in Eskişehir province, just north of the city, on the railway). The Greek advance from Eskişehir reached the Sakarya in August 1921 and was halted there. Following the Turkish victory at the Büyük Taarruz of 26 August 1922 — see our Afyonkarahisar essay — Eskişehir was recovered by the Turkish army in early September 1922 as part of the same Pursuit Operation that retook İzmir. The standard summary is in Bernard Lewis's The Emergence of Modern Turkey.

x.The Republic and the Modern University City

Republican Eskişehir grew rapidly. The TÜLOMSAŞ locomotive workshops (reopened under the Republic in 1924), the Eskişehir Şeker Fabrikası (one of the earliest of the Republican sugar refineries, 1933), and from the 1950s onward a broad manufacturing base — Türk Hava Yolları's technical division has its main maintenance and overhaul base at Eskişehir, and the Turkish Aerospace Industries (TAI) plant at the airport is one of the principal national defence-industrial sites — built the city's working economy. From the 1960s the city has been one of the leading university towns of Türkiye, anchored by Anadolu Üniversitesi (founded 1958, with one of Türkiye's largest open-education programmes), Eskişehir Osmangazi Üniversitesi (founded 1970), and Eskişehir Teknik Üniversitesi (founded 2018 as a spinoff from Anadolu).

The metropolitan municipality covers fourteen districts, but the city proper is concentrated in two: Odunpazarı (south of the Porsuk, with the restored Ottoman-period old quarter) carries 426,581 people, and Tepebaşı (north of the Porsuk, the modern city) 394,734. Under the TÜİK 2024 address-based registration count the province population was 921,630; the city's strong university base gives it one of the youngest median ages of any Türkiye province.

xi.What to See, in Order

The walking circuit of Eskişehir runs along the Porsuk. From the central Porsuk Park, the route runs south across the Adalar pedestrian district and the small bridges to Odunpazarı, the restored Ottoman-period quarter of timber-framed houses on the southern slope, with the Atlıhan Hanı and the Kurşunlu Camii ve Külliyesi (1525, designed in the manner of the early Sinan school) at its heart. Within the Odunpazarı quarter are the Lületaşı Müzesi (the meerschaum-pipe museum), the Eskişehir Çağdaş Cam Sanatları Müzesi (modern glass-art museum), and the new Odunpazarı Modern Müzesi (2019, in a striking interlocking-timber building designed by Kengo Kuma).

Around the city, the principal excursion runs south into Dağlık Frigya — the Phrygian rock country — with the great Midas Monument at Yazılıkaya near Han (in the Afyonkarahisar–Eskişehir borderlands), and the various smaller Phrygian rock-cut tomb façades along the Phrygian Way walking route. The other natural excursion is east to Sarıköy in Mihalıççık district, for the Yunus Emre Müzesi and the small commemorative complex around the poet's traditional tomb.

The Phrygian capital of the rock-cut tombs, the Crusader battlefield of 1097 and 1147, the country of Yunus Emre, the world's meerschaum, and the railway town that has become Türkiye's busiest university city.

For the Phrygian country in the wider sense, see Afyonkarahisar and the planned essay on the Phrygian civilisation. For the Seljuk period from which Eskişehir emerged, see the Seljuks of Rûm. For Türkiye's central plateau in the wider sense, visit our sister site CountryOfTurkey.com.