Our compilation for Sivas, not an official route. The province is wide and the list follows it, so these are separate outings rather than one chain.
Divriği, in the south-east, holds the anchor. The Great Mosque and hospital there were built together in 1228-29, the mosque by the Mengujekid ruler Ahmed Şah and the hospital by his wife Turan Melek, and the complex was the first architectural work from this country inscribed on the World Heritage List. The canyon of the Çaltı stream beside the town became a national park in 2024, and unusually its boundary takes in castles, a mosque and a disused church rather than empty ground. The two belong together in one visit.
The city centre is compact. The Atatürk and Congress Museum is the 1892 building where the Sivas Congress met and where Mustafa Kemal and those with him stayed for a hundred and eight days; the archaeological museum occupies a school of industry raised at the end of the same decade; and the museum of war horses, in the Hamidiye culture park, keeps to one subject, which its directorate says no other museum in the world does.
The rest pulls to the corners. Sivrialan, in Şarkışla, is the house where Âşık Veysel was born, expropriated in 1979 and opened as a museum; Gürün, in the south, has the mill associated with Somuncu Baba, known from an endowment deed of 1398; and two small nature parks lie in the north, at Koyulhisar and Suşehri, the second of them planted rather than found. What each place is, and who says so, is on its own page.
