Karaman

i.The Plateau Beneath the Toros

Karaman sits a little over a hundred kilometres south of Konya, on the south-central shoulder of the Anatolian plateau, at an elevation of roughly a thousand metres. To the north and east the plain unfolds — a wide, dry country of wheat fields, sugar-beet rows, and the long straight irrigation canals that have turned this part of central Türkiye into one of the country's quieter granaries. To the south the horizon lifts. The Toros (Taurus) range rises in a long blue wall, and behind it, hidden from the plateau, the Mediterranean. The city stands at the edge of two worlds: the open inland steppe at its back, the mountain wall in front.

Geologically the province is a wedge of the central Anatolian basin, with the foothills of the Toros climbing through Sarıveliler, Başyayla, and Ermenek into a country of limestone gorges, sinkholes, and karst caverns. The lowland around the city itself is fertile and well-watered, fed by springs that come off the mountains and from a small number of permanent streams. Bulgur and sugar beet ripen in the late summer; almond and apple orchards lift their pale dust in the spring. Around Ayrancı, on the eastern edge of the plain, a small reservoir holds the snowmelt and feeds the irrigation channels that have made the modern province possible.

The full administrative reach is modest — roughly nine thousand one hundred and sixty-three square kilometres, with a population a little above a quarter of a million. Karaman became a separate province only on 15 June 1989, when Türkiye's parliament — by Law No. 3578 — carved it out of the much larger Konya Eyalet's modern successor. Until that date it had been a district within Konya Province; for almost six centuries before that, since the Ottoman conquest, it had been part of the great Karaman Eyalet whose capital was Konya itself. The 1989 elevation restored to the city, after the long Ottoman demotion, the dignity its medieval past had earned.

A quiet city on a high plateau, with the Toros at its back and six centuries of language history written into its stones.

ii.Laranda — The Antique City

The Roman and Byzantine sources call the city Laranda. The name reaches back, by way of Hittite, Phrygian, and Greek tongues, into a deeper antiquity than the documents themselves: a settlement on this site, a town beside the springs at the foot of the mountains, has been a fixed point of the south-central plateau for at least three thousand years. The classical authors place Laranda in Isauria — that rough hill country of brigands and shepherd-soldiers whom Rome found it easier to ignore than to subdue — and at the same time on the long road network that linked Iconium (Konya) to the Cilician passes and so to the Levant.

Under the early empire Laranda was a market town and a way-station; under the late empire, a small bishopric. The city was sacked at least once, by the Isaurians themselves in the third century, then rebuilt; it survived the upheavals of the Arab raids of the seventh and eighth centuries; and it endured under Byzantine administration until the Turkish migrations that followed the battle of Manzikert in 1071. The Roman name continued in local use for at least another two centuries — Anatolian Seljuk and early Karamanid documents still know the city as Lârende — and only fell away gradually as the Turkish name Karaman, taken from the dynasty that had made the place its capital, became the official one.

Of the antique city itself little survives above the ground. The medieval and modern town has been laid over the Roman, the Roman over what came before. But the situation of the place — the springs, the road, the position at the mountain edge — is the same. The country a Roman governor would have seen, riding south through the wheat in the late summer toward the gap in the Toros, is recognizably the country a visitor sees today.

iii.Binbir Kilise — The Thousand and One Churches of Karadağ

Forty kilometres north of Karaman, the northern plain breaks against an isolated mountain — Karadağ, "the Black Mountain," the eroded core of an extinct volcano that rises to 2,290 metres above the surrounding plateau. On the northern slopes of Karadağ, scattered across the high pasture in two principal clusters around the villages of Madenşehir and Değle, are the ruins of one of the most remarkable Byzantine ecclesiastical landscapes in Anatolia: the complex known by its Turkish name Binbir Kilise, the Thousand and One Churches.

The number is rhetorical rather than literal. The surveys count something closer to a hundred — perhaps a hundred and ten — Byzantine churches, monastic compounds, cisterns, and ancillary buildings, ranging in date from the fifth century to the ninth or tenth. The masonry is rough but the planning is confident: barrel vaults, simple apses, the small triple-aisled basilica plans that mark the Anatolian Christian centuries. There was no city here; the cluster appears to have been a monastic landscape, a high country of cells and chapels where the religious life of central Anatolia was carried on by communities whose names are not preserved.

The Binbir Kilise complex is reached from Karaman by a road that climbs gently through wheat fields and orchards toward the dark cone of Karadağ. The site is unenclosed and largely unsignposted; the visitor walks among the ruins as Bell did. The high meadow holds the apse-walls of basilicas at chest height, the stumps of arches, the floor-plans of small chapels framed by the wind. Nothing is reconstructed. There is no ticket office, no café, no commentary. The country itself, and the silence Bell heard, are what survive.

iv.The Karamanids and the Turkish Tongue

The dynasty that has given the city — and the modern province — its name was a Turkmen lineage that rose, in the mid-thirteenth century, out of the chaos that followed the Mongol shattering of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rûm at Köse Dağ in 1243. The Karamanoğulları, as the Diyanet İslâm Ansiklopedisi records the line, traced themselves to Nure Sofi, a dervish-warrior who settled with his clansmen in the rough hill country around Ermenek toward 1250, and to his son Karaman Bey, who carved out a small principality in the southern Toros and gave the dynasty its enduring name.

Within a generation the Karamanids had moved their centre down onto the plain, to Lârende — to what we now call Karaman city — and from that base they reached out for the prize. Konya, the old Seljuk capital, was held by Mongol-appointed officials in the years after Köse Dağ; the Seljuk sultans themselves were figureheads. In 1277, Karaman Bey's son Mehmet Bey, in alliance with a pretender to the Seljuk throne and against the Mongol regency, marched on Konya and took it. He installed his candidate, sat in the Seljuk seat of justice — the dîvân — and on 13 May 1277 issued the decree by which the dynasty is remembered.

The political career of the Karamanid state was longer and more turbulent than any single decree. From their plateau capital the beys ruled south-central Anatolia for two and a half centuries. They considered themselves the legitimate heirs of the Seljuks of Rûm — keepers of the Anatolian sultanate that the Ottomans, in their telling, had merely usurped — and through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries they were the most determined rivals the rising Ottoman state had to face. Karamanid armies were defeated and reformed; their territory shrank, expanded, shrank again. The dynasty's last serious resistance ended in 1466–67, when Mehmed II — Mehmed the Conqueror, fresh from his Constantinople triumph — campaigned in person against the Karamanids and brought the heartlands under Ottoman administration. A residual Karamanid presence persisted under his successors; the final incorporation, with the last claimants suppressed or pensioned, came under Bayezid II in 1487.

From that date Karaman became an Ottoman provincial centre. The Ottomans took the dynasty's name and gave it to one of their great eyalets — the Karaman Eyalet, with its capital at Konya rather than Karaman itself — and the city sank into the secondary status it would hold until 1989. But the buildings of the Karamanid centuries stayed. The Hatuniye Medresesi, an early-fourteenth-century theological college endowed by a Karamanid princess, still stands on a quiet street near the centre of the modern town; its portal, with the carved arabesque framing and the broad pointed arch characteristic of Karamanid masonry, is one of the finest of its period in Anatolia. The İmaret Camii, a fifteenth-century mosque-and-soup-kitchen complex built under the late Karamanids, holds court in the bazaar quarter and preserves a vaulted hall in which the daily distribution of bread to the poor was once made. The Karaman Kalesi — the Karamanid citadel — rises on a low hill at the southern edge of the old town; restoration has been ongoing under the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, and the curtain walls and the inner keep are now once again accessible by a path that climbs from the modern square.

v.Yunus Emre and the Literary Plateau

Of all the medieval figures whose memory the city claims, the deepest is that of Yunus Emre. The dates of his life are uncertain — the consensus places him roughly between 1240 and 1321 — and the place of his birth has been contested for centuries. Sarıköy in Eskişehir, several villages in the Aksaray plateau, and at least three other Anatolian towns have all advanced their claims. Karaman's is among the strongest. The Diyanet İslâm Ansiklopedisi entry on Yunus, weighing the evidence of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century biographical traditions and of the manuscript copies of the Risâletü'n-Nushiyye, treats Karaman as a principal contender for both birth and burial.

What is not contested is the importance of his verse. Yunus Emre is the founding poet of Anatolian Turkish literature — the first major voice in the spoken tongue of the country, writing not in Persian after the manner of the court but in plain, devotional Turkish that ordinary people could understand and remember. His lyric is short, simple, and bone-deep:

İlim ilim bilmektir, ilim kendin bilmektir / Sen kendini bilmezsin, ya nice okumaktır.
"Knowledge is to know knowledge; knowledge is to know oneself. / If you do not know yourself, what is the use of reading?"

The city's claim is anchored at the Yunus Emre Camii, an unprepossessing mosque on a quiet side street whose southern wing holds a small tomb chamber long identified by local tradition as the burial of the poet. The shrine attracts a steady traffic of visitors — schoolchildren brought on language-day excursions, devotional pilgrims from the surrounding villages, students of literature on their way through. Other towns may have their own Yunus shrines and their own claims; Karaman's is held with the unhurried confidence of a place that has had to argue the case for longer than the Republic itself has existed. UNESCO declared 1991, on the seven-hundredth anniversary of the poet's traditional death year, the International Year of Yunus Emre, and the city marked the occasion with restorations to the mosque and the publication of a series of provincial editions of his Dîvân.

vi.The Province Today and Visiting

Modern Karaman is a quiet, ordered provincial capital of around a hundred and fifty thousand people, set on a flat plateau under the long blue wall of the Toros. The city has the calm of a place that has decided what it is — a centre of regional agriculture, a college town with the campus of Karamanoğlu Mehmetbey Üniversitesi (founded in 2007 and named, inevitably, for the bey of the 1277 decree), and a stop on the long-distance bus route between Konya and the Mediterranean. The food industry — biscuit and confectionery factories, flour mills, the Divle dairy cooperative — anchors the local economy.

The province's six districts run from the plain into the Toros: Merkez at the centre, Ayrancı on the eastern edge of the plain with its small reservoir, Kâzımkarabekir to the north-west, and the three mountain districts of Sarıveliler, Başyayla, and Ermenek in the southern uplands. Ermenek is the largest and historically the most important of the mountain districts; its narrow gorge town, set on a shelf above the Göksu valley, was the original Karamanid base before the dynasty moved down to the plain, and the older Roman name of the place — Germanikoupolis, given in the second century in honour of the emperor Germanicus — survives in the modern toponym. In 2014 Ermenek suffered a flooding disaster at a local coal mine that drew national mourning; the district is now a quiet centre of fruit-growing and small hydroelectricity.

The Karaman table

The plateau eats as plateau country has always eaten: bulgur, lamb, yoghurt, slow soups, hard cheese. Karaman keşkeği — the local version of the slow-cooked wheat-and-lamb pottage — is taken at weddings and funerals and at the great religious holidays, pounded in wooden mortars in the old way. Arabaşı çorbası is the winter morning soup, thickened with maize flour, eaten with a curiously square noodle that the cook breaks off in lumps and floats on the surface. Şirden dolması — the lamb's stomach stuffed with rice and currants — is a feast-day dish. And from the high pastures of Ayrancı comes the province's most famous food, the Divle obruk peyniri, a hard sheep's-milk cheese that is aged in cloth sacks lowered into the deep, cool dark of the Divle sinkhole, a karst cavern that maintains, all year, the conditions of a stone refrigerator. The cheese carries the registered geographical indication of the Türk Patent ve Marka Kurumu (TPMK), and its production is now a small protected industry of perhaps a few hundred tonnes a year.

The province in numbers