Yozgat

i.The Bozok Plateau

Yozgat sits on the long, treeless upland country between the Kızılırmak (the ancient Halys) to its west and the Yeşilırmak basin to its northeast, at 1,300 metres above the sea. The country is one of the highest of the central Anatolian provinces — exposed, cold in winter, dry in summer — and historically known as Bozok, the name of the wider plateau and the medieval-and-early-modern administrative district. The provincial seat itself sits on the southern slope of the Akdağ massif (2,907 m). Wheat and barley have been the principal agricultural products since the Hittite period; sheep-rearing and dairy occupy the higher pastures.

ii.Hittite Country and the Galatian Frontier

The country belongs to the deepest archaeological layer of central Anatolia. The Hittite imperial capital at Hattuşa — see our Hattusha essay — lies only 75 kilometres northwest of modern Yozgat, in Çorum province but within the same upland Bozok-and-Çekerek country. The Hittite-period inscriptions of the wider region treat the Bozok plateau as the eastern marches of the imperial homeland. After the Bronze Age collapse the country passed through the brief Phrygian phase of the Iron Age, the long Achaemenid Persian satrapy of Cappadocia, and then — from the 3rd century BCE — into the territory of the Galatians, the Celtic-speaking people who migrated from southeastern Europe into central Anatolia in the 270s BCE.

Galatian Yozgat was part of the territory of the Trocmi tribe, one of the three Galatian peoples (the others being the Tolistobogii and the Tectosages); their tribal centre lay at Tavium, just east of modern Yozgat. Tavium became, under Roman rule, the capital of the Trocmi and a moderately important regional centre. After Augustus's annexation of Galatia as a Roman province in 25 BCE, the wider Yozgat country was part of the province of Galatia for the next four centuries.

iii.Roman and Byzantine Yozgat — the Sarıkaya Baths

The most distinguished surviving Roman-period monument of the province is the great Roma Hamamı at Sarıkaya, in the southeastern part of the province. The complex — a Roman thermal bathhouse fed by natural hot springs at the foot of the Akdağ — was built in the 2nd or 3rd century CE and continued in use through the Byzantine and Seljuk periods. Excavations conducted by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism in the 2000s and 2010s recovered substantial mosaic flooring and the original vaulting; the site was added to the UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List as the Roma Hamamı (Aquae Saravenae) in 2014.

Through the long Byzantine centuries Bozok was a working frontier province, with small fortified centres along the Sivas-Ankara road and progressive contraction under the Arab raids of the 7th to 10th centuries.

iv.Seljuk, Mongol, and the Long Medieval Centuries

The Turkish entry into Bozok came in the late 11th century after Manzikert. Through the 12th and 13th centuries the country was held by the Anatolian Seljuk Sultanate of Rûm; after the Seljuk collapse at Köse Dağ in 1243 it passed through Mongol Ilkhanid administration and the small post-Mongol Anatolian principalities — the Eretnids, briefly the Karakoyunlu, and the Dulkadirids of Kahramanmaraş. Ottoman annexation came under Sultan Selim I in 1515, after the absorption of the Dulkadirids; Bozok became a sancak of the new Sivas Eyaleti.

v.The Çapanoğlu Family and the 18th-Century Town

The history of modern Yozgat is in essential continuity with that of one extraordinary 18th-century family. In the late 17th century the Ottoman state settled the Mamalu Türkmen — a confederation of Turkic pastoral groups from eastern Anatolia — across the Bozok plateau, on lands granted to them as has (royal demesne). One Mamalu family, the Çapanoğulları (also called Cebbârzâde), rose rapidly through the Mamalu hierarchy in the early 18th century. Çapanoğlu Ahmet Ağa was appointed Yeniil Has Mütesellimliği (the steward of the Yeniil royal demesne) in 1728, advanced to the Mamalu Türkmen mütesellimliği in 1732, and to the Bozok Mütesellimliği — the governing of the entire Bozok sancak — in 1741.

From 1741 the Çapanoğlu family ruled Bozok as a hereditary âyân (provincial notable) family — one of the four or five greatest provincial dynasties of the late-Ottoman empire, alongside the Karaosmanoğlu of Aydın, the Cezzar Ahmet Paşa line of Acre, and the Tepedelenli of Yanya. The Çapanoğlu commanded substantial military forces, raised provincial revenue, and built the modern urban form of the city. The family's centre was the town the contemporary sources called Yozgat — derived from the Türkmen word yozgat, "fattening pasture" — at the modern provincial seat.

vi.The Çapanoğlu Büyük Camii (1779)

The architectural symbol of the Çapanoğlu period is the Çapanoğlu Büyük Camii — "the Great Mosque of the Çapanoğlu" — completed in 1779 under Çapanoğlu Mustafa Bey. The mosque is a substantial single-domed building in the late-Ottoman provincial idiom, with an unusual two-storey gallery around the prayer hall, a hand-painted floral-and-vegetal interior in the 18th-century baroque-influenced manner, and a small bath, a medrese, and a library attached. The complex is a working example of late-18th-century provincial âyân architecture, and one of the most complete surviving provincial-Ottoman complexes of its period in central Türkiye. The Çapanoğlu family also built the Çapanoğlu Küçük Camii ("the Small Mosque," 1789), the Çapanoğlu Library, and several smaller monuments in the city centre.

vii.The 1920 Rebellion and the National Struggle

The Çapanoğlu family's relationship with the Republican national movement, in the closing phase of the Ottoman empire, was complicated. Members of the family were active in the early Müdâfaa-i Hukuk committees and in the Erzurum and Sivas congresses of summer 1919. By spring 1920, however, divisions had emerged within the family and the wider Bozok elite, and a substantial rebellion broke out — the Çapanoğlu İsyanı of May–June 1920 — directed against the Grand National Assembly's new government in Ankara. The rebellion was suppressed by Mustafa Kemal Paşa's forces under the command of Çolak İbrahim Bey within several weeks; some of the rebellion's leaders were executed, others were pardoned and reintegrated into the Republican structure. The Çapanoğlu rebellion is treated factually in the Sivas-Ankara historiography as one of the early local-elite uprisings against the National Struggle, and reflects the broader transition from the older provincial-âyân order to the new Republican administrative structure.

viii.The 1927 Renaming — Bozok to Yozgat

Under the Republic the province carried, for the first several years, the older administrative name Bozok. On 25 June 1927, on the proposal of the Yozgat deputy Süleyman Sırrı İçöz, the Grand National Assembly formally renamed the province Yozgat — preferring the older Türkmen toponym attached to the provincial seat over the broader regional designation. The provincial boundaries have shifted modestly since but the name has not.

ix.The Modern Province

Under the TÜİK 2024 address-based registration count the province population is 413,208. The metropolitan municipality covers fourteen districts. The largest by population are Merkez (~109,000, the provincial capital), Sorgun (~80,000, with the Sorgun coal mines and the principal industrial district), Boğazlıyan (~32,000), Akdağmadeni, Yerköy, and Çekerek. The provincial economy is primarily agricultural — wheat, barley, sugar-beet, and the famous local kıvırcık and akkaraman sheep — supplemented by coal mining at Sorgun, the small Sarıkaya thermal-tourism centre, and the manufacturing belt along the Sivas–Ankara road. The province is the seat of Yozgat Bozok Üniversitesi (founded 2006).

x.What to See, in Order

The walking shape of historic Yozgat concentrates on the Çapanoğlu axis. From the central Cumhuriyet Meydanı the route runs to the Çapanoğlu Büyük Camii (1779) — mosque, library, and the adjoining 18th-century complex — and to the Çapanoğlu Küçük Camii (1789). The small Nizamoğlu Konağı ethnographic museum (an 18th-century timber-framed townhouse restored in the 1990s) is the principal indoor stop. The Yozgat Müzesi in central Cumhuriyet Caddesi holds the regional archaeological collection, including Galatian and Roman finds from Tavium.

For the wider province, the principal excursions reach Sarıkaya for the Roma Hamamı (UNESCO Tentative List 2014), Çekerek for the small Galatian-Roman archaeological sites at Tavium, and — northwestward into Çorum province — the great Hittite capital at Hattusha, about an hour and a half's drive from the city centre.

The Bozok plateau, the Çapanoğlu family of âyân, and the great 1779 mosque at the centre of the late-Ottoman provincial town.

For the parallel central Anatolian provinces, see Kırşehir and Sivas; for the Hittite capital immediately to the northwest, see Hattusha. For Türkiye's central plateau in the wider sense, visit our sister site CountryOfTurkey.com.