Nevşehir

i.The Town on the Volcanic Plain

Nevşehir sits on the lower slopes of a long ridge of volcanic tuff at the western edge of the great Cappadocian plateau, roughly halfway between the cones of Mount Erciyes to the east and Mount Hasan to the southwest. From the citadel hill above the town — a ruined Seljuk-period work, much remodelled in the Ottoman centuries — the country opens in three directions over the broken tuff of the plateau, past Uçhisar to the rock chimneys of Göreme in the east, and northward across the gradual fall of the land toward the Kızılırmak. The town itself, by Anatolian standards, is not old. Its public face — the great Kurşunlu Külliyesi, the inns and fountains and stepped streets of the central quarter — is essentially a single architectural project of the 1720s; what came before is the small medieval village whose name was Muşkara.

For the deeper layers of history that surround it — the Hittite-period country, the Persian satrapy of Katpatuka, the Roman province under Tiberius, the Byzantine rock-cut churches and the underground cities — see our regional essay on Cappadocia. The Nevşehir page is the modern provincial story: an 18th-century refoundation, a Republican province, and the administrative seat of one of the most-visited cultural landscapes in Türkiye.

ii.Before 1725 — Muşkara at the Foot of the Citadel

The settlement on the slope below the citadel hill is attested through the long Byzantine and Seljuk centuries as a small farming village under the name Muşkara. The provincial governorate's own historical sketch dates the Turkish settlement of the area to the period after the 1071 Manzikert victory, when Turkmen villages were planted across the central plateau under the loose authority of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rûm — see our essay on the Seljuks of Rûm. Under the Ottomans, Muşkara was an unremarkable kaza in the sancak of Niğde, with a handful of fountains, a small mosque, and the surrounding gardens that gave the village its later orchards. What changed everything was that one of those village houses, in the late 17th century, produced a child who would rise to be grand vizier of the empire.

iii.Damat İbrahim Paşa and the Refoundation of 1725

The child was İbrahim, born around 1660 in Muşkara, who rose through the imperial palace bureaucracy and in 1718 was named grand vizier by Sultan Ahmed III. The same year he married the sultan's daughter Fatma Sultan, taking the title damat ("son-in-law to the imperial house") and becoming known thereafter as Nevşehirli Damat İbrahim Paşa. He held the vizierate for twelve years — an exceptionally long tenure — during which the period now called the Lâle Devri, the Tulip Era (1718–1730), unfolded as a brief opening of the empire toward European court culture, French books and prints, garden pavilions on the Bosphorus, and a fashion for the tulip as an aesthetic and economic obsession of the Istanbul elite.

İbrahim Paşa did not forget the village of his birth. In 1725, by imperial decree, the village of Muşkara was renamed Nevşehir — "new city" — and its boundaries widened. Over the following five years, until the grand vizier's death in the Patrona Halil revolt of 1730, an unusually concentrated programme of public construction transformed the village into a planned small city: a great mosque-and-medrese complex on the slope, two hamams, fountains, an imaret (soup-kitchen), a kütüphane (library), a covered market, and a network of stepped lanes connecting them. The whole project, financed largely from the grand vizier's own household, was completed in his lifetime. Nevşehir is, in this sense, one of the few cities in Türkiye that has a documentable date of foundation as a town.

iv.The Kurşunlu Külliyesi and the Tulip-Era City

The centrepiece of İbrahim Paşa's foundation is the Kurşunlu Camii — "the leaden mosque," named for the lead sheets covering its dome — and the külliye (complex) around it. The mosque was completed in 1726. It is a single-domed Ottoman classical mosque of moderate size, in the late style of the imperial architects, with a portico, a tall minaret, and a small but distinguished interior in the Iznik-tile manner. The complex around it — a medrese on two storeys, the imaret kitchens, the small hamam, the library — is unusual in the completeness of its survival; the whole group has been substantially restored under the Ministry of Culture and Tourism in recent decades, and the imaret, in particular, was reopened in the 2020s as a working soup-kitchen on the original model.

The wider urban form of Tulip-Era Nevşehir is the subject of one of the more striking case studies in Ottoman urban history. Shirine Hamadeh's The City's Pleasures: Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century (University of Washington Press, 2008) places the Nevşehir project in the same architectural conversation as the contemporaneous palaces and pavilions of Sa'dabad on the Kâğıthane stream — a re-imagining of the Ottoman provincial town through the same vocabulary of garden, fountain, and printed European topographical view that defined the metropolitan elite culture of the period.

v.Hacıbektaş — Pir Evi and the Bektaşi Tradition

Forty-five kilometres north of Nevşehir, on the road toward Kırşehir, lies the small town of Hacıbektaş — formerly the village of Sulucakarahöyük — which carries the name and the tomb of Hacı Bektâş-ı Velî, the 13th-century Khorasani dervish whose lodge here became the spiritual centre of the Bektaşi tradition of Anatolian Sufism. The conventional date of Hacı Bektâş's death is 1271; a waqf document of 691 AH / 1292 CE refers to him as already deceased. The tomb (the türbe) and the dervish hall (the meydan evi) at its centre, set within three successive courtyards of low domed buildings, form what the Bektaşi tradition calls the Pir Evi — the House of the Pir, the founder.

From the 15th century onward the Bektaşi order was closely associated with the Janissary corps of the Ottoman army; the dissolution of the Janissaries in 1826 was followed by the partial suppression of the order, and the Republican law of 1925 closing the Sufi lodges shuttered the Pir Evi formally. Since 1964 the complex has operated as the Hacıbektaş Müzesi under the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. Each year, in the week around 16 August, the town hosts the Hacı Bektaş Velî Anma Törenleri — large public commemorations that draw the Alevi-Bektaşi community from across Türkiye and the Balkans. For the wider regional context in which the order took shape, see our Cappadocia essay; for the standard scholarly account, Irène Mélikoff's Hadji Bektach: Un mythe et ses avatars (Brill, 1998).

vi.The Other Towns of the Province — Avanos, Ürgüp, Gülşehir

Avanos, on the south bank of the Kızılırmak twenty kilometres north of the city, is the traditional pottery town of the plateau; the red river-clay has been worked here continuously since at least the Bronze Age, and a small but persistent guild of potters still throws on the kick-wheels in workshops along the bank. Ürgüp, twenty kilometres east, is the older market town of the province and the centre of its small but distinguished wine industry — the volcanic soils produce particularly good white wine from the Emir grape and red from Boğazkere — with the annual International Cappadocia Wine Festival each October. Gülşehir, twenty kilometres northwest on the road to Kırşehir, sits on the rim of the Kızılırmak gorge; below the town is the rock-cut church complex of Açıksaray ("the open palace"), and on the Kayseri road south are the smaller towns of Acıgöl and Derinkuyu, the latter the site of the largest of the Cappadocian underground cities.

vii.The Republic, 1954, and the Modern Province

Republican Nevşehir grew slowly. Through the first three decades of the Republic the town remained a kaza within Niğde province. It was elevated to a province in its own right by Law no. 6429 of 20 July 1954, which carved a new vilâyet out of Niğde with Nevşehir as its centre. The boundaries have shifted little since; the province today comprises eight districts — Merkez (the central district around the town), Hacıbektaş, Avanos, Ürgüp, Gülşehir, Derinkuyu, Acıgöl, and Kozaklı — covering the western and central parts of the Cappadocian rock country.

Under TÜİK's 2024 address-based registration count, the province population is 320,150, with about half — 163,126 — in the central district. By the standards of central Anatolian provinces the population is small but the economy is unusually balanced: agriculture (potatoes, grapes, fruit), small-industrial production, and, above all, the tourism economy of the Cappadocian rock country, which has grown enormously since the 1990s and which is administered for World Heritage purposes by the Kapadokya Alan Başkanlığı, an autonomous agency under the Ministry of Culture and Tourism since 2019. The province is also home to Nevşehir Hacı Bektaş Veli Üniversitesi (founded 2007), the principal regional university.

viii.What to See in Nevşehir

In the town itself, the half-day walking circuit runs through the Kurşunlu Külliyesi complex — mosque, medrese, hamam, library, imaret — and then up the stepped streets of the old quarter to the kale, the Seljuk-Ottoman citadel that crowns the volcanic ridge above the central avenue. The view from the citadel walls — back over the town to the western horizon of the plateau, and east toward Uçhisar and the rock chimneys of Göreme — is the best single panoramic introduction to what Cappadocia is. The Nevşehir Müzesi on Atatürk Bulvarı carries the regional archaeological collection, with finds from the Hittite period through the Byzantine rock churches.

From the town, every major Cappadocian site is within a half-day's drive: the Göreme Open-Air Museum, the underground cities of Kaymaklı and Derinkuyu, the painted gorge of Ihlara in Aksaray province, and — distinct from the rock-cut country but inseparable from the spiritual landscape of the plateau — the Hacıbektaş Pir Evi to the north. For the regional essay that ties all of this together, see Cappadocia.

A planned 18th-century town on a volcanic ridge — built in a single hand by a grand vizier who had been born in its predecessor village, and made the modern centre of the most-visited landscape in Türkiye.

For the regional history within which Nevşehir sits, see Cappadocia. For the Seljuk centuries that planted Muşkara and the other Turkmen villages of the plateau, see the Seljuks of Rûm. For another central-Anatolian capital, see Ankara. For Türkiye's full state geography, visit our sister site CountryOfTurkey.com.