Gümüşhane

i.The Harşit Valley

Gümüşhane sits in the upper valley of the Harşit Çay — the small river that runs north through the eastern Pontic Alps to the Black Sea at Tirebolu (in modern Giresun province) — at 1,210 metres. The country is one of the highest of the inland Pontic provinces, enclosed by long forested ridges on every side: the great Zigana pass (2,025 m) to the north opens the route to Trabzon and the Black Sea coast, while the south-eastern boundary at Vauk Mountain (2,400 m) marks the watershed with Erzincan and Erzurum. The country is famous in regional memory for the long winters and the heavy snows; the climate is severely continental despite the relative proximity to the sea.

The defining historical feature of the province is the silver deposit that gave the city its Turkish name Gümüşhane — "the silver house" — and its older Greek name Argyropolis, "the silver city." Silver ore (mainly galena, lead sulphide containing argentiferous fractions) outcrops in the mountains around Süleymaniye and was worked continuously from antiquity through the 19th century.

ii.Argyropolis — the Silver City

The historic-period settlement on the modern province appears in Byzantine and medieval sources as Argyropolis (Greek Argyrópolis, "the silver city"), referring to the high mountain town that grew up around the silver-mining settlement. The exact founding date is uncertain; the Byzantine sources mention the silver mines from at least the 10th century. The medieval town site is at the modern Süleymaniye Mahallesi (also called Eski Gümüşhane, "Old Gümüşhane") — an old mountain town three kilometres west of the modern provincial seat, perched on the steep western slope of the Harşit valley.

Under the Komnenian Empire of Trebizond (1204–1461), Argyropolis was one of the principal silver-mining centres of the empire, supplying the Komnenian mint at Trebizond and — through the trans-Pontic trade — the wider eastern Mediterranean. The Venetian traveller Marco Polo, passing through the country in 1271 on his outward journey to Cathay, mentions the silver mines of the region. Two generations later, in 1334, the Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta records the mines in his Rihla (Travels) as one of the principal mineral sources of the eastern Anatolian country.

iii.The Silver Mines and the Medieval Trade

The mines of Argyropolis-Gümüşhane were among the most productive silver workings of the wider Mediterranean world from the 13th through the 19th centuries. The principal operations were at Hazine Mağarası and the various smaller pits in the slopes above Süleymaniye, with substantial open-pit and gallery operations. The silver was smelted on site using charcoal from the surrounding pine forests and sent down the Harşit valley to the Black Sea coast at Tirebolu or — more commonly — overland to the Komnenian and (later) Ottoman mints at Trebizond.

Ottoman administrative records of the 16th and 17th centuries place Gümüşhane among the most important darphane (mint) sites of the empire, alongside İstanbul, Edirne, Cairo, and Aleppo. The mines remained in commercial production through the 18th and into the 19th century, but by the late 19th century the readily accessible ores were exhausted and the operation contracted. Modern small-scale silver and lead extraction continues at the Mastra mine in Şiran district under the Koza Altın İşletmeleri.

iv.Ottoman Canca and Gümüşhane

The Ottoman annexation of the wider Harşit valley came with the absorption of the Empire of Trebizond by Mehmed II in 1461. Through the early Ottoman period (16th and 17th centuries) the principal town carried the local name Canca — a contraction of an older Hellenic or Armenian toponym, the exact derivation contested in the literature. Under Süleyman the Magnificent (reigned 1520–66), as the mint operation expanded, the town increasingly carried the Turkish-period name Gümüşhane ("the silver house"), reflecting the role of the local mint and the wider silver economy.

The Ottoman period saw Gümüşhane established as one of the relatively prosperous inland mining-and-trade towns of the wider Trabzon Eyaleti. The town's character was — like that of many Anatolian mining centres — substantially multi-confessional: the Valilik's official account describes the old quarter of Süleymaniye as "one of Türkiye's most important centers of tolerance, where Muslim Turks and non-Muslim Ottoman subjects, Christian Greeks and Armenians lived together for centuries." Under the Tanzimat-period reforms of the 1840s and 50s Gümüşhane was raised to sancak status within the Trabzon Eyaleti.

v.Süleymaniye Mahallesi — Eski Gümüşhane

The principal heritage site of the province is Süleymaniye Mahallesi — the old town of Gümüşhane, three kilometres west of the modern provincial seat. The old town is an unusual surviving Pontic-mountain mining town, with substantial Ottoman-period stone-and-timber buildings — mosques, churches (the Hagios Theodoros church survives as a roofless ruin), the bedesten, the small darphane mint building, and dozens of two-and-three-storey stone houses with the characteristic deep wooden balconies. The old town was substantially depopulated through the 20th century — most of the population moved down the valley to the modern administrative town — and a Ministry of Culture and Tourism conservation programme has been working since the 2010s to restore the surviving fabric.

vi.Karaca Mağarası and the Natural Sites

The principal natural site of the province is the Karaca Mağarası — a substantial limestone cave with substantial stalactite-and-stalagmite formations, opened to the public in 1996 as one of the principal show-caves of Türkiye. The cave sits at the village of Cebeli in Torul district, 17 kilometres north of central Gümüşhane on the road to Trabzon. The main gallery (one of seven small inter-connecting chambers) is 105 metres long with formations dated to the late Pleistocene.

The other principal natural sites of the province include the Limni Gölü (a small glacial lake in the eastern part of the province at 2,300 metres), the Tomara Şelalesi waterfalls in Şiran district, and the Zigana pass at the northern boundary with Trabzon (with its small ski centre at the summit and the great Pontic-Alps panoramic views).

vii.The Republic and the Modern Province

Gümüşhane was made a province under the Republican administrative reorganisation of 1925, and remained so through the long 20th century with relatively little growth. The principal Republican-era development was the opening of the Ankara-Erzurum railway through the Harşit valley in the 1930s and the modern motorway through the Zigana pass. The 1990 establishment of Bayburt as a separate province removed the small inland districts to the east; the resulting reduced provincial boundaries are essentially those of the modern province.

Under the TÜİK 2024 address-based registration count the province population is 142,617, one of the smallest in Türkiye and contracting modestly year on year. The metropolitan municipality covers six districts. The largest are Merkez (~54,500, the central historic city), Kelkit (~41,000, the eastern district on the upper Harşit), Şiran (~20,000, the southern district), and Torul (~12,000) on the road to Trabzon; Kürtün and Köse are the smaller districts. The province is the seat of Gümüşhane Üniversitesi (founded 2008).

viii.What to See, in Order

The walking shape of historic Gümüşhane runs on two sites — the modern central district and the older settlement at Süleymaniye. From the central Cumhuriyet Meydanı the route runs through the small Ottoman-and-Republican-period central streets to the Gümüşhane Müzesi with the regional ethnographic and mining collections. The principal route then crosses the Harşit and climbs the western slope to Süleymaniye Mahallesi — the abandoned old town of Eski Gümüşhane — for the ruined Hagios Theodoros church, the small surviving mosques and bedesten, the darphane mint building, and the panoramic view back over the new town.

For the wider province, the principal excursions reach the Karaca Mağarası in Torul district, the Limni Gölü in eastern Kelkit, and the Zigana Geçidi ski centre on the Trabzon road. The small Ottoman-period Santa Ruins in Çamlıbel village (in Kürtün district) — a substantial late-19th-century Pontic-Greek mountain town largely abandoned after the population exchange — are one of the most evocative small heritage sites of the eastern Pontic country.

The silver city of the high Harşit — Komnenian Argyropolis, Marco Polo's and Ibn Battuta's mountain mint, and the old town of Süleymaniye that the modern province grew away from.

For the parallel inland Pontic province to the east, see the planned Bayburt essay (split off from Gümüşhane in 1990); for the Black Sea coast immediately north, see Trabzon and Giresun. For Türkiye's eastern Pontic and inland geography, visit our sister site CountryOfTurkey.com.