Kahramanmaraş

i.The Mountain Foothills and the East Anatolian Fault

Kahramanmaraş sits on a long terrace at the southern foot of Ahır Dağı (2,343 m), where the eastern Taurus mountains step down to meet the wide alluvial plain of the Maraş Ovası and the Ceyhan river. The city is at 568 metres, with cooler summers than Adana to the southwest and milder winters than Sivas to the north. Westward the plain opens to the Çukurova and the Mediterranean; eastward and northward, the long basalt plateau of the Elbistan Ovası rises to the Pınarbaşı country of Kayseri province.

The defining geological feature of the province is the East Anatolian Fault Zone (Doğu Anadolu Fay Hattı), the great left-lateral strike-slip fault that runs from Karlıova in the north through Bingöl, Malatya, Pazarcık, and Türkoğlu before joining the Dead Sea Transform near Antakya. The fault is one of the principal active tectonic boundaries of the eastern Mediterranean; its release on 6 February 2023 produced the largest of the modern earthquakes of Türkiye.

ii.Hittite Gurgum and the Bronze Age

The historic-period settlement on this site emerged in the late Bronze Age as the capital of the small Hittite-period kingdom of Gurgum, attested in cuneiform sources from at least the 12th century BCE. Gurgum was one of the small Neo-Hittite successor states that survived the Hittite imperial collapse around 1180 BCE, retaining the use of hieroglyphic Luwian for monumental inscriptions through the early Iron Age. The kingdom's territory ran from the central Taurus south to the upper Pyramus (Ceyhan) valley; its capital, on or near the modern Maraş citadel mound, was a fortified town of considerable size by 10th-century standards.

Several of the Gurgum kings — Larama, Halparuntiyas, Kuwalanamuwa — are known from hieroglyphic inscriptions recovered from the citadel and now displayed in the Kahramanmaraş Arkeoloji Müzesi and in the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara. The standard reference for the Neo-Hittite kingdoms is Trevor Bryce's The Kingdom of the Hittites (Oxford UP, 2005), and his companion The World of the Neo-Hittite Kingdoms (Oxford UP, 2012).

iii.Assyrian Markasi, Roman Germanicia Caesarea

Gurgum was absorbed by the Assyrian empire in the 8th century BCE. The Assyrian sources call the city Markasi — the immediate ancestor of the medieval and modern names Maraş / Kahramanmaraş. After the Assyrian collapse the country passed through Babylonian, Persian Achaemenid, and Macedonian rule before becoming a small Roman client-kingdom on the eastern fringe of Cappadocia.

Under the Romans the city was renamed Germanicia Caesarea in honour of the imperial general Germanicus (15 BCE – 19 CE); it was raised to colonial status by the emperor Septimius Severus in the late 2nd century, and through the long imperial peace was a working provincial centre with a small but substantial Christian community by the 4th century. The 6th-century mosaics of Germanicia — including the large Yeni Mahalle mosaics excavated in the early 2000s and displayed in the Kahramanmaraş museum — are among the most distinguished surviving examples of late Roman provincial mosaic art in Türkiye.

iv.The Arab Frontier (645–10th c.)

Arab forces took the city in 645 CE, in the first wave of the eastern Islamic expansion; it became, almost immediately, one of the principal fortified outposts of the Thughur — the line of Arab-Byzantine frontier fortresses that ran from Antioch through Marash and Malatya to Erzurum. The city was rebuilt by the Umayyad caliph Muʿāwiyah I in the 7th century and substantially refortified by the Abbasid caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd around 800. Through the next three centuries Maraş was at the centre of the long, slow military exchange between the Abbasid caliphate and the Macedonian Byzantine empire; the city changed hands several times before settling, in the 11th century, into the Turkmen federations of the post-Seljuk eastern frontier.

v.The Dulkadir Beylik (1337–1522)

The most consequential medieval period in Maraş's history is the rule of the Dulkadiroğlu Beyliği — a Turkmen principality founded in 1337 by Karaca Bey, an emir of the Bozok Türkmen confederation, with its initial centre at Elbistan and from the late 14th century at Maraş. The Dulkadir state ruled the central Mediterranean foothills for nearly two centuries, navigating the rivalry between the Egyptian-Syrian Mamluks (to the south), the Ottomans (to the west), and the Akkoyunlu and Safavids (to the east). At their height in the late 15th century the Dulkadirids controlled a substantial principality running from the Çukurova plain north into Sivas province and east to Malatya.

The Dulkadir Beylik produced the surviving monumental fabric of the historic city: the Maraş Ulu Camii (begun under Süleyman Bey c. 1442–47, completed 1502 by Alâüddevle Bey), the Hatuniye Camii (1495), the Taş Medrese, and the older sections of the Maraş Kalesi citadel. The dynasty came to an end in 1522, when Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent executed the last Dulkadir bey Şehsuvaroğlu Ali Bey and annexed the principality to the Ottoman state. The standard scholarly reference is Refet Yinanç's Dulkadir Beyliği (Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1989).

vi.Ottoman Maraş (1515–1918)

Maraş first passed under Ottoman administration in 1515, during Sultan Selim I's eastern campaign — formally as the sancak of Maraş in the Karaman eyalet, and from 1531 as the capital of its own Maraş Eyaleti (the Dulkadir Eyaleti). Through the long Ottoman centuries the city was a working provincial centre and a major regional market for the central Mediterranean foothills. The 19th century saw the city's incorporation into the larger Aleppo Vilâyeti (from 1898), reflecting the late-Ottoman administrative reorganisation of the eastern Mediterranean provinces.

vii.The Occupation of 1919 and the Maraş Resistance

The First World War and the Armistice of Mudros of 30 October 1918 left the central Mediterranean provinces of the Ottoman empire under Allied occupation. British forces entered Maraş on 22 February 1919; on 30 October 1919, under the redistribution of mandates between Britain and France, the British garrison withdrew and a French force took over occupation duties in the city. The occupation lasted three and a half months.

Armed resistance to the French occupation organised itself rapidly through the late autumn of 1919, drawing on the same network of Müdâfaa-i Hukuk committees that Mustafa Kemal Paşa had organised at the Erzurum and Sivas congresses earlier in the year. The Maraş Müdâfaa-i Hukuk Cemiyeti was founded on 29 November 1919; the spark for armed action came with the so-called Sütçü İmam Olayı ("the Sütçü Imam Incident") of late October–November 1919 — a confrontation in the Uzunoluk quarter that escalated through December and January into open street fighting.

viii.The Liberation of 12 February 1920

Open warfare between the irregular Turkish forces of the Maraş Müdâfaa-i Hukuk and the French garrison opened on 21 January 1920. The fighting continued for three weeks through the streets and bazaars of the lower city; by early February the French command had concluded that the position was untenable, and on the night of 11–12 February 1920 the French garrison evacuated Maraş under cover of darkness, withdrawing southward toward Islahiye. The morning of 12 February 1920 is observed annually as Maraş'ın Kurtuluşu — the Liberation of Maraş — and is the principal civic holiday of the modern province.

The Maraş resistance was one of three local resistance campaigns of the early National Struggle that produced a withdrawal of foreign forces without external negotiation — the others being at Antep (modern Gaziantep) and Urfa (modern Şanlıurfa). In recognition of this, the Grand National Assembly conferred on the city the Independence Medal (İstiklal Madalyası) on 5 April 1925, and on 7 February 1973, by act of parliament, granted it the honorific prefix Kahraman- ("hero-") in front of the older name — producing the modern Kahramanmaraş.

ix.The Republic and the Modern Province

Republican Kahramanmaraş grew modestly through the 20th century, anchored by its agricultural hinterland (cotton, pepper paste, tobacco), by its long-standing tradition of carpet-weaving and copper-working, and by the steady regional trade running between Adana and Gaziantep. The province is also the home country of Maraş dondurması, the chewy salep-and-mastic ice cream that is among the best-known regional foodstuffs of Türkiye, made in Kahramanmaraş since at least the 19th century.

The metropolitan municipality covers eleven districts. The central urban districts are Onikişubat (~436,000), named for the 12 February liberation date, and Dulkadiroğlu (~218,000), named for the Beylik. The two together carry over half the province's population. Further from the centre, the largest districts are Elbistan in the eastern Elbistan plain (~130,000), Afşin (~52,000), Pazarcık (~67,000), and Türkoğlu. Under the TÜİK 2024 address-based registration count the province population is approximately 1.13 million, reduced from the pre-2023 figure by the displacement and migration that followed the earthquakes.

x.6 February 2023 — and the Heritage Programme

The earthquakes of 6 February 2023 — treated in the present-note at the top of this essay — have been the defining event of the modern province. The Pazarcık epicenter lay within the province itself; the Elbistan epicenter, in the northern Elbistan plain of the same province. The Kahramanmaraş Arkeoloji Müzesi (housing the Gurgum-period reliefs and the Germanicia mosaics) was structurally damaged but the collections were largely saved; the great Ulu Camii (1502), the Maraş Kalesi, and the Kapalı Çarşı were all heavily damaged. The historic core of the city — the Uzunoluk quarter where the 1919–20 resistance took place — was rendered structurally unsound.

The reconstruction-and-conservation programme has been led since by a partnership between the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, the Provincial Directorate of Cultural Heritage, and TOKİ. Reconstruction of the Ulu Camii and the citadel began in 2024 and is, by 2026, in advanced phase. Our sub-feature Heritage After the Earthquake treats the conservation programme in detail, drawing on the Abacıoğlu Gitmiş & Avcı 2026 analysis in the Türk Deprem Araştırma Dergisi.

xi.What to See, in Order

The walking shape of historic Kahramanmaraş — to the extent visitors find it during the 2024–26 reconstruction phase — runs along the foot of the citadel. The route runs from the central Cumhuriyet Meydanı past the Sütçü İmam Müzesi (the small museum at the site of the 1919 Uzunoluk incident) up the slope to the Maraş Kalesi (the citadel mound, currently in restoration; the open-air upper platform reopened in 2025). Below the citadel stand the Ulu Camii (begun 1442, completed 1502, under restoration since 2023), the Hatuniye Camii (1495), the Taş Medrese, and the Kapalı Çarşı (the late-Ottoman covered bazaar, partially reopened).

The Kahramanmaraş Arkeoloji Müzesi — temporarily relocated since 2023 to a provisional building on Trabzon Bulvarı — holds the Gurgum hieroglyphic-Luwian reliefs and the late Roman Germanicia mosaics. For the wider province, the principal excursions reach the Elbistan plain in the east — the original Dulkadir capital, with the Eski Maraş archaeological site north of Afşin and the great basalt plateau of Nurhak Dağı — and the Pazarcık and Türkoğlu districts to the south, both of which sit directly on the East Anatolian Fault.

Gurgum, Markasi, Germanicia, Maraş — and the central Mediterranean province where the East Anatolian Fault broke on a winter morning in 2023.

For the sub-feature on the post-earthquake conservation programme, see Heritage After the Earthquake. For the parallel 2023-affected provinces, see Hatay and Adana. For the wider Mediterranean foothills, see Gaziantep and Şanlıurfa. For Türkiye's Mediterranean geography in the wider sense, visit our sister site CountryOfTurkey.com.