Sivas

i.The High Plateau and the Kızılırmak

Sivas province sits at the meeting point of three of central Anatolia's great geographical zones — the high steppe of the eastern plateau, the foothills of the Pontic Alps to the north, and the headwaters country of the Kızılırmak. The provincial seat is at 1,285 metres, the highest of any major provincial capital in Türkiye; the country to its south climbs to 2,800 metres along the watershed that divides the Kızılırmak basin from the upper Euphrates. The river Kızılırmak — Türkiye's longest, the ancient Halys — rises in the eastern part of the province at Kızıldağ and runs westward through the city before turning north toward the Black Sea. The wide treeless plains of the province are some of the coldest country in the country in winter — Sivas commonly records temperatures below minus 25 degrees Celsius — and one of the principal grain-belts of Central Anatolia in summer.

The province is, after Konya, the second-largest by area in Türkiye, at 28,488 km². Its sheer size — together with its high elevation, harsh climate, and modest population — gives it the character of a frontier-and-plateau province, more like Erzurum than like Kayseri or Ankara.

ii.Sebasteia — the Roman and Armenian Foundation

The historic-period city on this site was founded in the 1st century BCE under the late kingdom of Pontus. The name Sebasteia — "the city of Augustus," from the Greek translation of the Latin Augustus — was bestowed by Pythodorida, the widow of King Polemon I of Pontus, in honour of the Roman emperor whose client her dynasty had become. Under the emperor Diocletian, near the end of the 3rd century CE, Sebasteia became the capital of the new Roman province of Armenia Minor (Lesser Armenia), the small Anatolian portion of the historic Armenian highland that lay on the Roman side of the frontier with the Sasanian empire. The city remained Armenia Minor's capital through the late Roman and early Byzantine centuries.

The form Sebasteia shifted, in late Greek and Arabic mouths, through Sebaste / Sebastiya to the Turkish Sivas, the name the city has carried since the 11th century.

iii.Byzantine Sebasteia and the Forty Martyrs

Byzantine Sebasteia is best known to Christian tradition as the place of martyrdom of the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste — forty Roman soldiers said to have refused to renounce their Christianity under the persecution of the emperor Licinius in 320 CE, and to have been left to die exposed on the ice of a frozen lake outside the city. Their cult became one of the most widely venerated in the Greek-Orthodox church; their feast is observed on 9 March. The supposed lake survives outside the modern city.

Through the long Byzantine centuries Sebasteia was a major garrison town and an important frontier centre. Its location on the long road from Constantinople to the eastern frontier — and as the gateway to the upper Euphrates and the Armenian highlands — gave it permanent strategic significance. It was repeatedly attacked by Arab raiding forces in the 7th to 10th centuries, but never lost; the population repopulated again, and the walls were rebuilt under Byzantine emperors from Theophilus to Basil II.

iv.The Danişmendli Capture and the Beylik (c. 1080–1172)

The Turkish entry to the central plateau followed the Byzantine defeat at Manzikert in 1071 — see our essay on the Seljuks of Rûm. By 1080 Turkmen raiders had reached Sebasteia, and the city was taken — by negotiation rather than storm, in most accounts — about 1080–90 by the Turkmen commander Danişmend Gazi, whose dynasty established the Danişmendli Beylik as the first major Turkish principality of the central plateau, with its capital at Sivas. The Danişmendlis held the city through the late 11th and the 12th centuries — almost a hundred years of independent rule — during which Sivas grew, attracted Turkic and Persianate scholars from further east, and built the first generation of its Islamic-period monuments.

In 1172 Sivas was absorbed into the Anatolian Seljuk Sultanate of Rûm under Kılıçarslan II, the great Seljuk consolidator who would, four years later, defeat the Byzantines at Myriokephalon (1176) and effectively secure the central plateau for Turkish rule.

v.The Seljuk Golden Age (1172–1243)

The seventy years between the Seljuk takeover of Sivas in 1172 and the Mongol intervention at the battle of Köse Dağ in 1243 — fought in the mountains of northern Sivas province — are the city's high architectural and economic age. Sivas in this period was, after the capital at Konya, the second city of the Seljuk state, the great inland market between the Anatolian and Persian trades, and the meeting point of the caravan routes from Tabriz to Constantinople and from Trabzon to Aleppo. The standard scholarly account is in Claude Cahen's The Formation of Turkey: The Seljukid Sultanate of Rûm (Longman, 2001 English edition).

vi.The Seljuk Medreses — Gök, Şifaiye, Çifte Minareli

Sivas preserves three of the greatest medrese complexes of Anatolian Seljuk architecture, all built within fifty years of each other on or near the central Hükümet Meydanı. The Şifaiye Medresesi — "the hospital and medical school" — was built by Sultan İzzeddin Keykavus I in 1217–18, originally a hospital and one of the earliest dated Islamic teaching hospitals in Türkiye; the founder's tomb (the türbe) sits inside the courtyard, its conical roof clad in turquoise tiles. The Gök Medrese — "the Blue Medrese," for the turquoise tile of its great twin minarets — was built in 1271 by the Seljuk vizier Sahip Ata Fahrettin Ali, and is now the city's archaeological museum; its façade carving — a kufic inscription band, a stylised tree of life flanked by lions, and the famous double-headed eagle — is among the great achievements of Seljuk stone-cutting. The Çifte Minareli Medrese — "the medrese of the double minarets" — was built across the square in 1271 by the Ilkhanid vizier Şemseddin Cüveyni (a contemporary of the Gök Medrese and a kind of architectural reply to it); only the great twin-minareted portal façade survives.

To these three may be added the small but exquisite Buruciye Medresesi (1271, immediately west of the Şifaiye), and the older Ulu Cami (the Great Mosque, originally Danişmendli, c. 1197, with later additions) one block to the south. The standard reference for the architecture is Oktay Aslanapa's Türk Sanatı (1971 / English edition Turkish Art and Architecture, Praeger).

vii.Divriği — and the UNESCO Ulu Camii of 1228

The greatest single monument of Sivas province lies not in the city itself but at the small town of Divriği, 170 kilometres east on the road toward Erzincan. The Divriği Ulu Camii ve Darüşşifası — the Great Mosque and Hospital of Divriği — was built in 1228–29 by the local ruler Ahmed Şah of the small Mengücekoğulları beylik and his wife Turan Melek (whose adjoining hospital was probably the world's first dedicated psychiatric hospital). It was designed by the architect Hürremşah of Ahlat. The mosque-and-hospital is a single conjoined complex; its four great portals — the Northern (Çarşı) Portal, the Western (Hospital) Portal, the King's Portal, and the Royal Pavilion Portal — carry stone-relief carving of an inventiveness and depth that has no parallel in Islamic architecture before the Renaissance: tendrils of vegetal ornament, six-pointed and twelve-pointed star systems, calligraphic and geometric programmes integrated into one whole.

The Divriği complex was inscribed by UNESCO on the World Heritage List in 1985 (inscription #358) under criteria (i) — "the unique architectural expression of an architect of genius" — and (iv). It was among the first UNESCO inscriptions in Türkiye, alongside Göreme and the Historic Areas of İstanbul.

viii.From the Eretna to the Ottomans

The Mongol period (1243–1335) and the small Anatolian principalities that emerged from it — the Eretna Beylik (1335–1381) based at Sivas, the Kadı Burhaneddin sultanate (1381–1398) — kept the city as a regional capital. Timur (Tamerlane) sacked Sivas catastrophically in 1400, killing much of the population. The Ottoman annexation came under Bayezid I in 1398 and was completed under Mehmed I in the 1410s, after which Sivas was the centre of a sancak and (from 1521) of the Sivas Eyaleti, one of the great administrative regions of the empire, comprising much of east-central Anatolia.

ix.The 1919 Sivas Congress — Capital of the National Struggle

The city's place in the modern history of Türkiye rests on the Sivas Congress of 4–11 September 1919. Following the Armistice of Mudros (October 1918) and the partial occupation of the country, Mustafa Kemal Paşa — newly arrived in Anatolia from İstanbul on 19 May 1919 — had convened a first regional congress at Erzurum (23 July – 7 August 1919; see our forthcoming Erzurum essay). The Sivas Congress was the national follow-on, attended by delegates from across the country, and it produced two foundational decisions: the merging of the regional resistance committees into a single national organisation — the Anadolu ve Rumeli Müdafaa-i Hukuk Cemiyeti (Association for the Defence of the Rights of Anatolia and Rumelia) — and the formation of a permanent Representative Committee (Heyet-i Temsiliye) under Mustafa Kemal as its chairman. The congress's Beyanname (declaration) of 11 September 1919 set out the principles of national independence, indivisible territorial integrity, and majority self-rule that would, over the next four years, shape the war of independence and the Republic.

Sivas itself was, for the 108 days from the closing of the congress to the move of the Representative Committee to Ankara on 27 December 1919, effectively the headquarters of the National Struggle. The Sivas Valiliği publishes a detailed account of these 108 days; the standard English-language synthesis is in Bernard Lewis's The Emergence of Modern Turkey (3rd ed., Oxford UP, 2002). The school building in which the congress met — the Atatürk Kongre ve Etnoğrafya Müzesi on Cumhuriyet Caddesi — has been preserved as a museum, with the original assembly room kept as it was in September 1919.

x.The Republic and the Modern Province

Republican Sivas grew quietly. The Sivas–Erzurum railway, completed in 1939, gave the city a working connection to the eastern provinces; the Atatürk Demir-Çelik Fabrikası iron-and-steel works (opened 1937 at Karabük, north of Ankara) and the Sivas-based TÜLOMSAŞ / TÜVASAŞ locomotive workshops anchored the city's industrial base. Under the TÜİK 2024 address-based registration count the province population was 631,401; the metropolitan municipality covers seventeen districts, the largest of which — by a long way — is the central district of Merkez (~393,000). The province has lost population steadily since the 1980s as the eastern Anatolian rural exodus continued.

The city is the seat of Sivas Cumhuriyet Üniversitesi (founded 1974) and Sivas Bilim ve Teknoloji Üniversitesi (founded 2018). On 2 July 1993, during the annual Pir Sultan Abdal cultural festival, a fire at the Madımak Oteli on the city's central avenue took thirty-five lives — an event that is observed annually in the city's modern public memory.

xi.What to See, in Order

The walking circuit of historic Sivas is small: the Hükümet Meydanı — the central square — carries the great Seljuk monuments within five minutes of each other. The Şifaiye Medresesi (1217), the Gök Medrese (1271; now the archaeological museum), the Çifte Minareli Medrese (1271, surviving façade), and the Buruciye Medresesi (1271) form a single Seljuk-monument cluster. The Ulu Cami (c. 1197) is two minutes south; the Atatürk Kongre ve Etnoğrafya Müzesi — the 1919 Congress building — five minutes east. The Sivas Kalesi, a Byzantine-and-Seljuk citadel, is now a small park above the city centre.

For the wider province, the principal excursion is to Divriği for the UNESCO Ulu Camii (170 km east) — a long day's drive. The thermal springs at Sıcak Çermik west of the city are the older spa tradition; Hafik and Kangal in the south are the regions of the Kangal sheep-dog, the Anatolian shepherd breed that takes its name from this district.

The high-plateau city of the Seljuk medreses — and the Anatolian headquarters from which Mustafa Kemal Paşa organised the National Struggle in the autumn of 1919.

For the regional Seljuk story, see Konya and the Seljuks of Rûm; for the parallel 1919 congress that preceded Sivas, see our forthcoming Erzurum essay. For Türkiye's central plateau in the wider sense, visit our sister site CountryOfTurkey.com.