Seljuk buildings set the tone in Kayseri. In the centre you can see a double medrese of 1205–1206 that now holds a museum of Seljuk civilisation, tomb towers carved with lions and eagles, and, on Cumhuriyet Square, the mosque Mimar Sinan built in his home province. The museums cover everything from the tablets of the Assyrian merchants to Atatürk's visits. The Koramaz valley and Talas add a valley museum, an underground city and a church turned mosque, and to the north-east the mound of Kültepe, where the oldest written records found in Anatolia came out of the ground. South of the city rises the extinct volcano of Mount Erciyes, and further out lie the reed beds of Sultan Marsh, the waterfalls of Yahyalı and the rock churches of Soğanlı.
Cumhuriyet Square: the clock tower and Sinan's mosque
The square is the natural starting point. Its clock tower, ordered by Abdülhamid II and finished in 1906 by Salih Usta of Tavlusun, is a square shaft of cut stone fifteen metres tall, with a Leipzig clock showing the time to all four directions. After the Sivas Congress, the returning Kayseri delegates opened the city's branch of the Defence of Rights society inside it.
The Kurşunlu Mosque, also called the Mimarsinan Mosque, dates from 1585 and takes its name from the lead covering its whole dome; look at the marble doorway. The provincial directorate counts it among the few Ottoman examples in a city where Seljuk work is the rule. Across the square, the Bürüngüz Mosque only looks old: Refik Bürüngüz built it in 1977 in the classical Ottoman manner.
The National Struggle Museum fills a neoclassical school building begun in 1903. On 24 July 1921 the Grand National Assembly voted to move the government to Kayseri and the building was prepared for its sittings, a plan dropped after Sakarya. Mustafa Kemal Pasha and Latife Hanım came to the school on 14 October 1924.
Seljuk Kayseri: the double medrese and the tomb towers
The Çifte Medrese is a pair of buildings, a hospital named after Gevher Nesibe and the Gıyasiye medrese beside it, put up by Gıyaseddin Keyhüsrev I as his sister, a daughter of Kılıçarslan II, had asked in her will. Since 21 February 2014 it has held the municipality's Museum of Seljuk Civilisation. One half covers the Seljuk city, its art, science and dress; the other stays with medicine: illnesses, instruments, pharmacy, and healing through music and colour. Many displays are meant to be handled or listened to.
On the Talas road, the Döner Kümbet was raised in 1276 for Şah Cihan Hatun, whose father was the sultan Alâeddin Keykubad I. All twelve faces are carved, and the figures set it apart: human-headed lions over the door, a palm tree with a lion on each side and a double-headed eagle over it, winged leopards. In the Hunat quarter, the Sırçalı Kümbet is a plainer cylinder of very regular stone, probably built for Cafer Bey, father of Alaeddin Eretna, in the first half of the fourteenth century.
The Gülük Mosque in Melikgazi goes back to the Danishmends, though its founding date is unknown; its oldest inscription records a repair of 1210 by Atsız Elti Hatun, and its lost medrese turned up only in the 1970s, under the prayer hall. On Talas Caddesi, the Seyyid Burhaneddin tomb is among the most visited shrines in the city. Burhaneddin taught Mevlana for nine years in Konya and died in Kayseri in 1244; the domed building over his grave dates from 1892 but follows Seljuk forms. Surp Krikor Lusavoriç, a church of 1191 now back in use for worship, keeps gospel scenes painted on its pendentives.
The city museums
The Kayseri Archaeological Museum has been open to the public since 1938; according to the provincial directorate, a rearrangement in 2019 moved the display into Kayseri Castle. Look for the cuneiform tablets of the Assyrian trading colony age, grave goods from the Beştepeler-Garipler tumulus and the Kayseri Herakles sarcophagus. The Ethnography Museum fills the Güpgüpoğlu mansion, built between 1419 and 1497, part of it furnished as an Ottoman home and the rest showing tiles, weapons, manuscripts, carpets, dress and jewellery.
Atatürk spent two nights, 19 and 20 December 1919, in the İmamizade Raşit Ağa house, now the Atatürk House. In the Fuar Kültür Park, the Kadir Has City and Mimar Sinan Museum, which the directorate calls the first digital museum in Türkiye, tells the city's story through screens and headphones and shows models of Sinan's buildings. The Mimar Sinan House Museum is a sixteenth-century house the ministry credits to Sinan himself. The Abdullah Gül Museum and Library occupies the old Sümerbank cloth mill, restored by Emre Arolat Mimarlık so that its past stays visible. The Ahi Evran lodge is given over to the tradesmen's brotherhood.
Ağırnas, the Koramaz valley and Talas
At Ağırnas, the Koramaz Valley Museum in the restored Çerkes Mustafa Bey Konağı introduces the seven settlements of the valley, which is on UNESCO's tentative list, through the love story of Oğuz, who is Muslim, and Suzan, who is Greek. The underground city at Ağırnas has places of worship, beams and paintings showing use mainly from the first to the thirteenth centuries AD. In the middle of Talas, the Yaman Dede Mosque was built in 1886 as the Panaya church and became a mosque in 1925, after the population exchange.
Kültepe: the ancient city of Kanesh
Kültepe, where the Kayseri plain ends to the east, was the seat of the kingdom of Kanesh in the second millennium BC and the head of the Assyrian trading colonies; its karum directed all the others, and Assyrian merchants lived in this lower town between about 1950 and 1650 BC. The tablets are the point of the place: mostly letters, contracts and seals, entered in 2015 on UNESCO's Memory of the World register, which covers the documents and not the site. Excavation has gone on since 1948, first under Tahsin Özgüç, and on the mound and in the Karum you walk through excavated houses, shops, workshops and public buildings. Without a car, take a bus towards Sivas from the eastern garage to the Kültepe junction and walk the last two kilometres.
Mount Erciyes
Erciyes, at 3,917 metres the highest mountain in central Anatolia, is an extinct volcano, and its eruptions supplied the rock that later weathered into the landscape of Cappadocia. Its Hittite name meant White Mountain. Its ski centre is one of the main winter sports areas in the country, climbers come for mountaineering and ice climbing, and in summer trekking tours run on its slopes, among them a long route to the Kapuzbaşı waterfalls.
Sultan Marsh, Yahyalı and Soğanlı
Sultan Sazlığı, seventy kilometres from the city, joins fresh and salt water in the middle of the steppe, and both main migration routes between Africa and Europe pass over it. Some 300 kinds of bird have been counted, among them cranes, flamingos and white-headed ducks, and you can take a boat into the reeds to photograph them. It became a national park in 2006. The name goes back to the Ottoman sultans, who hunted and rested here; Murad IV spent more than three months at the marsh in 1636 on his way to Yerevan.
In Yahyalı district, the Kapuzbaşı falls are springs that leave the rock already falling, deep in the Aladağlar of the Central Taurus, and Turkish Wikipedia ranks one as the highest in Türkiye. Eighty kilometres from Yahyalı, the Yedi Göller are seven lakes at 3,150 metres, filled by snowmelt and glaciers. Derebağ Waterfall Nature Park lies ten kilometres south-west of Yahyalı. In Yeşilhisar district, Soğanlı has some fifty rock churches, eight of them open, including domed ones the Ministry says Göreme, Zelve and Ihlara lack; our Cappadocia guide covers it alongside those valleys.
