Kırıkkale

i.The Kızılırmak Plain

Kırıkkale sits on the right bank of the Kızılırmak — the ancient Halys, the longest river of Türkiye — at the point where the river leaves the wide bend of central Anatolia and turns north toward the Black Sea. The city is at 700 metres, on a small plain bounded on the west by the steppes of Ankara province and on the east by the rolling country of Kırşehir. The country is open, treeless, and unusually flat for central Anatolia, with a continental climate of hot summers and cold winters. Through the long Ottoman centuries the wider area was part of the Ankara Sancağı; the modern city, by contrast with almost every other provincial capital in this collection, has no pre-Republican history.

ii.Pre-Republican Kırıkkale — Yahşihan and the Roads

The pre-Republican landscape of the country around Kırıkkale consisted of a few small Türkmen villages — most notably Yahşihan, the largest of the local settlements through the Ottoman centuries, and the small village originally called Kırıkkale on the spur of higher ground above the river. The single distinguishing feature of the country was its position on the Ankara–Sivas–Erzurum trans-Anatolian road, and on the railway that opened the same corridor in 1932. Yahşihan is the modern district name that preserves the older toponym; Kırıkkale itself became a working settlement only in the 1920s.

iii.The 1925 Foundation — the MKE Arms Factories

The decisive event in Kırıkkale's history was a decision of the early Republic. In 1921, in the closing phase of the National Struggle and with the wartime arms industry under sustained pressure, the Ankara government decided to relocate the Ottoman-era imperial arms-and-cannon factories from the vulnerable İstanbul-side to a new, defensible inland location. The site chosen — a small Türkmen village on the right bank of the Kızılırmak ninety kilometres east of Ankara, on the rail line that would shortly be built — was Kırıkkale. The Kırıkkale Valiliği's official chronicle records that the cannon-and-ammunition factories (the Top ve Cephane Fabrikaları) were laid down in 1925, three years after the proclamation of the Republic.

The factory complex grew rapidly through the 1920s and 1930s under the new Makine ve Kimya Endüstrisi Kurumu (MKE) — the state-owned Machine and Chemical Industry Corporation. By the 1930s Kırıkkale was the principal arms-manufacturing centre of Türkiye and the second-largest industrial centre of the country after İstanbul. The Valilik's account makes the point plainly: "The main reason for the emergence of Kırıkkale city was the decision … to establish an Arms Manufacturing Factory in this region and the laying of the foundations of cannon and ammunition factories in 1925." From a village of twelve households in 1925, the town grew to 205,000 inhabitants by 2001.

iv.The MKE Industrial Complex

The MKE Kırıkkale complex through the 20th century became, in essence, a single integrated arms-and-machine-industry city. The principal factories under MKE management at Kırıkkale included the Cannon Factory (Top Fabrikası), the Ammunition Factory (Mühimmat Fabrikası), the Small Arms Factory, the Brass Factory, the Steel and Cast Iron Factory (added in the 1950s, "specialising in high-quality alloy steel and machinery" per Britannica), and from the 1960s onward a chemical-industry wing producing explosives and propellants. At its peak in the 1980s the MKE Kırıkkale complex employed over 25,000 workers and supplied virtually all of the Turkish Armed Forces' artillery and small-arms requirements.

The complex remains a major working industrial site; recent decades have seen partial privatisation, broader integration with the TÜBİTAK SAGE defence-research apparatus, and the addition of newer joint-venture firms (Roketsan, Aselsan partners) on the city's industrial periphery. The MKE Silah Sanayi Müzesi — the MKE Arms Industry Museum — on the factory campus is the principal public-facing site of the complex.

v.The 1989 Province Law

Through the early Republican decades and into the 1980s Kırıkkale was a working ilçe (district) of the larger Ankara province. The city's rapid 20th-century growth — by the mid-1980s its population had reached approximately 185,000, larger than that of several smaller Anatolian provincial capitals — made the administrative arrangement increasingly anomalous. By Law no. 3578 of 21 June 1989, passed under the government of Prime Minister Turgut Özal, Kırıkkale was split off from Ankara and constituted as Türkiye's 71st province, with a new vilâyet established in the city and additional eastern districts (Keskin, Delice, Sulakyurt) transferred from neighbouring provinces. The boundary settlement gave the new province nine districts and a working geography from the Kızılırmak in the centre to the Çankırı border in the north.

vi.The Modern Province

Under the TÜİK 2024 address-based registration count the province population was 283,053, modestly down from the 2023 figure — Kırıkkale has been losing population through the 2010s and 2020s as the partial restructuring of the MKE industrial workforce and the wider central-Anatolian rural exodus continued. The metropolitan municipality covers nine districts. The central Merkez (~193,000) carries about two-thirds of the provincial population. The secondary centres are Yahşihan (the older Türkmen village immediately west of the city, now an industrial extension), Keskin in the south, Delice on the road to Yozgat, and the smaller districts of Sulakyurt, Bahşili, Çelebi, Karakeçili, and Balışeyh.

The province is the seat of Kırıkkale Üniversitesi (founded 1992) — one of the principal regional universities of central Türkiye, with substantial engineering and defence-related programmes that reflect the city's industrial base. The economy remains dominated by the MKE complex, the oil refinery at TÜPRAŞ Kırıkkale (one of four national refineries, operating since 1986), and a growing private-sector machine-and-defence industries cluster.

vii.What to See, in Order

The walking shape of Kırıkkale is the shape of a 20th-century Republican industrial city — a grid of broad avenues, mid-century concrete-and-brick public buildings, and the long fence of the MKE factory campus along the city's southern edge. From the central Cumhuriyet Meydanı the route runs to the Büyük Cami (1958, the main Republican-period mosque of the city) and the MKE Silah Sanayi Müzesi on the factory campus — open to visitors and the most distinctive site of the city. The small Kırıkkale Müzesi on Atatürk Caddesi holds the regional archaeological collection (mostly Phrygian and Roman finds from the surrounding country).

For the wider province, the principal excursions reach Hasandede village in Keskin district — with the Hasandede Camii, a small late-Seljuk shrine attributed to a 13th-century dervish — and the Kapulukaya Dam reservoir on the Kızılırmak, the principal recreational site of the province. The Karaali Termal hot springs in central Bahşili district offer the small thermal-tourism circuit. The Kızılırmak gorge through northern Keskin and Delice districts is the principal natural landscape of the province.

A Republican industrial province — twelve households in 1925, the MKE arms city of the 1930s, the steel and chemical complex of the 1950s and 60s, and the 71st province of Türkiye in 1989.

For the larger central Anatolian province from which Kırıkkale was split off, see Ankara; for the parallel small central-Anatolian provinces, see Kırşehir and Yozgat. For Türkiye's central plateau and its modern industrial geography, visit our sister site CountryOfTurkey.com.