Kırşehir

i.The Central Steppe and the Kızılırmak

Kırşehir sits in the central Anatolian steppe west of the great bend of the Kızılırmak river, at 985 metres above the sea, in a broad, treeless upland country of wheat-and-barley fields and stone villages. The province is one of the most exclusively steppe of central Türkiye — without the volcanic backdrop of Cappadocia to its southeast, without the high pasture-land of Sivas to the east — and historically one of the most arid. The country is closed on the north by the long ridge of the Çiçek Dağı (1,690 m), on the south by the Aladağlar foothills running down into Niğde province, and on the east by the wide bend of the Kızılırmak. The provincial seat lies on a small plain in the middle of this country, at the meeting of the principal east-west and north-south roads of the central plateau.

ii.Mocissus / Justinianopolis

The historic-period city on this site is generally identified with the Byzantine town of Mocissus, refounded under the emperor Justinian I in the 6th century CE as a fortified Cappadocian centre and renamed Justinianopolis. Britannica's plain summary: "Kırşehir may have been Justinianopolis (Mocissus), which under the 6th-century Byzantine emperor Justinian I was a major town in the ancient district of Cappadocia." The Byzantine city declined through the 7th to 10th centuries under successive Arab raids — the country between the Halys and the Taurus was, after the Sasanian raids of the early 7th century, repeatedly the line of march for Abbasid armies — and by the time of the Seljuk arrival the older settlement had contracted into a small fortified town.

iii.Seljuk Kırşehir — 13th-Century Centre

The Turkish capture came in the late 11th century. Under the Anatolian Seljuk Sultanate of Rûm (see our Seljuks of Rûm essay) Kırşehir became, through the 13th century, one of the principal centres of the wider Anatolian Seljuk state — second only to Konya, Sivas, and Kayseri in administrative importance, and arguably first of all in the density of its intellectual and spiritual life. The 13th century at Kırşehir produced an extraordinary cluster of Turkish-Islamic figures: the dervish-mystic and poet Aşık Paşa (1272–1332), author of the Garîb-nâme, one of the earliest substantial works of vernacular Turkish poetry; the historian and poet Ahmed-i Gülşehrî, who wrote the Turkish-language Mantıkü't-tayr (an adaptation of Attar's Persian Sufi epic); and, above all, the figure who gave the city its enduring spiritual identity — Ahi Evran-ı Velî.

iv.The Cacabey Observatory of 1272

The single most distinctive monument of medieval Kırşehir is the Cacabey Medresesi ve Rasathânesi ("the Cacabey Medrese and Observatory") — a Seljuk teaching complex built in 1271–72 by the city's Seljuk governor (emir) Nureddin Cibril bin Cacabey, under the reign of Sultan Gıyaseddin Keyhüsrev III. The building is a working medrese — a rectangular cut-stone court with student cells around an open central iwan — but its central feature is a distinctive truncated stone tower with a small astronomical observatory on its summit. The observatory at Cacabey is, alongside the slightly earlier observatory at Maragha in Ilkhanid Persia, one of the few surviving working medieval Islamic observatories preserved as such. The complex was converted into a mosque (Cacabey Camii) in the Ottoman period; the lower medrese rooms and the observatory tower remain intact. The standard architectural reference is Oktay Aslanapa's Turkish Art and Architecture (Praeger, 1971).

v.Ahi Evran and the Ahilik Tradition

The most consequential cultural figure of medieval Kırşehir was Ahi Evran-ı Velî — properly Şeyh Nasırüddin Ebu'l-Hakayık Mahmud, born in Khorasan around 1171 and died at Kırşehir around 1261. Ahi Evran arrived in Anatolia in the early 13th century in the cultural-and-religious wave of Khorasani Sufis fleeing the Mongol advance through Central Asia — the same wave that brought Mevlana Celaleddin-i Rumi to Konya and Hacı Bektaş Veli to Sulucakarahöyük. Ahi Evran settled at Kırşehir, where he developed the loose Sufi-and-craft-guild tradition called Ahilik — a fusion of Khorasani Sufi piety with the older traditions of the futuwwa brotherhoods of the Arab-Islamic world.

The Ahilik organisation, which gathered the city's craftsmen (leather-workers — Ahi Evran's own trade — but also weavers, smiths, cobblers, and a total of thirty-two recognised trades) into religious-and-economic brotherhoods, became, through the 14th to 16th centuries, the principal organising structure of the urban Turkish-Islamic artisanal economy of Anatolia. The Britannica entry summarises: "From the 14th to the 18th century, Kırşehir was the stronghold of the influential Ahi brotherhood, a religious fraternity developed by the 14th-century leader Ahi Evran out of a medieval craftsmen's guild." The Ahilik centre at Kırşehir issued the icazetname (master's certificate) that every regional artisan needed to practise his trade in the Ottoman state.

Ahi Evran's tomb at the Ahi Evran Türbesi in central Kırşehir is one of the principal Sufi pilgrimage sites of central Türkiye. The standard scholarly account is Neşet Çağatay's Bir Türk Kurumu Olan Ahilik (Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1989). The Ahilik Kültür Haftası — the Ahilik Cultural Week, held annually in early September across Türkiye — is observed in Kırşehir as the principal civic event of the year.

vi.Aşık Paşa and the Anatolian Sufi Tradition

The wider 13th–14th-century intellectual centre of Kırşehir produced one of the foundational figures of vernacular Turkish literature: Aşık Paşa (1272–1332), grandson of the Khorasani-Anatolian sheikh Baba İlyas, and author of the Garîb-nâme — a 12,000-couplet Turkish-language Sufi didactic poem completed in 1330, and one of the earliest substantial works of literature in the Old Anatolian Turkish vernacular. Aşık Paşa's tomb at the Aşık Paşa Türbesi in central Kırşehir is the other principal medieval-period monument of the city; his role in establishing Turkish as a literary language places him alongside Yunus Emre and Hacı Bektaş Veli in the foundation of vernacular Anatolian-Turkish literary tradition.

vii.Ottoman and Republican Kırşehir

After the Anatolian Seljuk collapse at Köse Dağ (1243) and the brief Mongol Ilkhanid period (1243–1335), Kırşehir passed through a series of small post-Mongol Turkmen federations — the Eretnids, the Karamanids — before Ottoman annexation under Mehmed II in the late 15th century. Through the long Ottoman centuries the city was a steady second-rank provincial centre of the larger Karaman Eyaleti and (from 1845) of the Ankara Eyaleti, with its economy resting on the surrounding agricultural plain and on the residual Ahilik craft economy. The Republican government raised it to provincial status in 1923; it was briefly demoted to a district of Nevşehir in 1954 and restored as a province in 1957.

viii.The Modern Province

Under the TÜİK 2024 address-based registration count the province population is 242,777 — one of the smaller provinces of Türkiye. The metropolitan municipality covers seven districts. The central Merkez (~163,000) carries about two-thirds of the provincial population; Kaman (~33,000) is the secondary centre, known for its cevizli sucuk (walnut-rolled grape-must sausages, a regional speciality); Mucur (~18,000), Çiçekdağı, Akpınar, Akçakent, and Boztepe are smaller rural-and-agricultural districts. The province is the seat of Kırşehir Ahi Evran Üniversitesi (founded 2006, named for the city's saint).

The provincial economy is overwhelmingly agricultural — wheat, barley, sunflower, sugar-beet, and the famous walnut orchards of the Kaman valley. The Aladağlar geothermal zone south of the city has been developed since the 1990s as a thermal-tourism centre at Terme.

ix.What to See, in Order

The walking circuit of historic Kırşehir is small and concentrated around the central square. From the Cumhuriyet Meydanı the route runs to the Cacabey Camii ve Medresesi (1272) — observatory tower, medrese court, and the converted mosque — then to the smaller Alâeddin Camii (13th century) and the Ahi Evran Türbesi, the city's principal pilgrimage site. The Aşık Paşa Türbesi (early 14th century) sits on a small terrace above the eastern edge of the central district. The Melik Gazi Türbesi in nearby Kayseri-bound country is the small Danişmendli-period mausoleum of the early-12th-century commander.

For the wider province, the principal excursions reach Kaman (with the Japanese-Turkish archaeological excavations at the Bronze Age mound of Kalehöyük, and the small Kaman Kalehöyük Archaeological Museum opened in 2010), the small thermal resort at Terme, and the Hittite-period rock relief at Yeniyapan. The seasonal salt lake of Seyfe Gölü in the steppe north of the city is a major flamingo migration site.

The central-steppe city of the Cacabey Observatory and the Ahilik — Seljuk Kırşehir of the dervishes, the brotherhood of the thirty-two trades, and the early Turkish-language poetry of Aşık Paşa.

For the wider Cappadocia region of which Kırşehir lies on the northwestern edge, see Cappadocia; for the Seljuk capital, see Konya; for Hacı Bektaş Veli's lodge at Hacıbektaş, see our Nevşehir essay. For Türkiye's central plateau in the wider sense, visit our sister site CountryOfTurkey.com.