The city's name has been rewritten by every ruler in turn. Its oldest name, Mazaka, lasted until Rome; the Romans renamed it Kaisareia, the emperor's city; the Arabs said Kaysariya; after the Turkish conquest of Anatolia it became Kayseriye, and with the Republic, Kayseri.
What sits beside it explains the rest. Kültepe, just outside the modern city, was inhabited from the fourth millennium BC — the Chalcolithic — through the Assyrian, Hittite and Phrygian periods and on to the end of Roman times, and it survives as an open-air museum of all of them. Kayseri grew up near that centre and carries deep traces of every one of those civilisations.
Turkish rule began in 1067, when the Seljuk commander Afşin took the city. After the Seljuk state came the Eretnid principality, the Dulkadirids, Kadı Burhaneddin, the Karamanids and the Ottomans. Through all of them, and above all under the Seljuks, Kayseri was an important centre of Turkish culture, and the medreses, tombs and mosques from those centuries still stand in the old town.
