History and Culture of Aksaray, Explained

By All Over InformationUpdated August 10, 20268 min read

Aksaray is easy to underestimate and hard to forget. This provincial city on the edge of the Anatolian plateau has been a crossroads for nine thousand years, from the world’s first farming villages through the caravans of the Silk Road to the Seljuk, Karamanid, and Ottoman centuries. Because it is quieter than its Cappadocian neighbors, its history sits close to the surface: a Neolithic mound outside town, a leaning minaret downtown, and a valley of Byzantine churches half an hour away. The culture that surrounds it, all hospitality, tea, and slow conversation, belongs to the same unbroken story. This guide traces the layers, so you see them when you go.

A Crossroads at the Heart of Anatolia

Everything about Aksaray’s history begins with geography. The city sits on the plateau where the roads from Ankara, Konya, Cappadocia, and the Mediterranean coast converge, a position that made it a natural market, garrison, and resting place for every empire that ruled central Anatolia.

The landscape explains the rest. Volcanic mountains frame the horizon, and the soft tuff they produced became the building material of the region, cut into churches, monasteries, and houses. Rivers from the mountains watered the fields, and the flat steppe around the city grew wheat that fed the caravans passing through.

That combination, routes plus resources, is why the city endured while others faded. Every civilization here added a layer, and visitors today walk streets where the Neolithic, the Roman, the Seljuk, and the Ottoman all left their mark within a few kilometers of one another.

The Deep Past: Asikli Hoyuk

The story of Aksaray starts about nine thousand years ago at Asikli Hoyuk, a mound twenty-five kilometers from the city where one of the earliest settled villages in Anatolia took shape. The people of Asikli built rectangular mud-brick houses packed together, streets between them, and shared spaces for cooking and craft.

Excavations have shown a community that was beginning to domesticate sheep and goats, harvest wild grains, and experiment with the settled life that would transform human history. The site is a research dig rather than a monument, but its importance is immense, and the finds in the Aksaray Museum tell the story clearly.

Walking the mound, you stand where some of the first farmers in the world stood. It is a humbling thought, and it sets the tone for the rest of the region, where nearly every famous cave and carved church owes its existence to this same volcanic landscape and the communities that learned to live in it.

Aksaray, Turkey — Photo by smuldur on Pixabay

From Garsaura to Archelais: The Ancient City

The city proper emerges into written history under the name Garsaura, a settlement on the road between the kingdoms of the region. In the first century BC, the Cappadocian king Archelaus refounded and renamed it Archelais, and it flourished as an administrative and market town under Roman rule.

For centuries Archelais remained a stop on the imperial road network, and its position kept it busy through the Byzantine era, when the surrounding valleys filled with monastic settlements. The trade in salt from the great lake to the north and grain from the plateau supported the town through the Middle Ages.

Little of the ancient city is visible today above ground, but its skeleton underlies the modern center. The Aksaray Museum holds the coins, inscriptions, and funerary stones that piece together this long Roman and Byzantine chapter of the city’s life.

The Seljuk Age and the Silk Road

The arrival of the Seljuk Turks in the eleventh and twelfth centuries reoriented Anatolia, and Aksaray rose with them. The Seljuks made the city a key point on the trade routes between their capital at Konya and the eastern provinces, and they invested in it heavily.

The Grand Mosque, begun in the twelfth century, is the architectural anchor of the Seljuk city, and the medreses that followed made Aksaray a center of learning. Sultan Alaeddin Keykubad, the greatest of the Seljuk builders, is remembered in the region for the caravanserais that still bear his name.

Under the Seljuks, Aksaray became what it has always been at its best: a city of hospitality on a highway. Merchants, pilgrims, and armies all passed through, and the monuments they left behind, mosques, inns, and schools, still define the old center today.

The Caravanserais: Hospitality on the Highway

The great caravanserais of the thirteenth century are the most spectacular legacy of the Seljuk age around Aksaray. Sultanhani, on the road to Konya, and Agzikarahan, on the road to Nevsehir, were built as fortified roadside inns where merchants, animals, and goods could shelter for up to three days.

These were not simple stables. A caravanserai held a mosque, a bath, a kitchen, storerooms, and space for hundreds of travelers, all enclosed by massive walls that made them as secure as fortresses. The carved portals alone, with their geometric stonework, are among the finest works of Seljuk art in Turkey.

Standing in the empty hall of Sultanhani, you can feel the scale of medieval trade. These buildings were the hotels, banks, and trading posts of their time, and their presence explains why Aksaray’s name was known across the Islamic world.

Sufis and the Dervish Tradition

Central Anatolia was the heartland of Sufism in the medieval period, and Aksaray has a place in that story. The city was the birthplace of Somuncu Baba, a revered fourteenth-century saint, and its surroundings claim the tombs of other figures of the dervish tradition, including Taptuk Emre, the master associated with the great poet Yunus Emre.

The tomb complex of Somuncu Baba, with its mosque and courtyard, is still a pilgrimage site, and on his commemoration days the city fills with visitors from across Turkey. The tradition is alive, not archaeological: people come to pray, to remember, and to sit in the courtyard with tea.

For travelers, this is the layer of Aksaray’s culture that feels most immediate. The Sufi heritage explains the deep hospitality of the region, the reverence for guests that treat every stranger as a blessing, and the unhurried kindness you will meet in every shop and restaurant.

The Ottoman Centuries

The Ottomans absorbed Aksaray in the late fifteenth century after the Karamanid emirate, which had ruled the city through the previous hundred years, was brought into the empire. The Zinciriye Medrese, with its famous leaning minaret, stands as the great monument of the Karamanid period.

Under the Ottomans, Aksaray settled into the role of a provincial market town. Its position on the road to the east kept it busy, its grain fed Istanbul, and its craftsmen, weavers, and tanners served the region. The centuries were quiet compared with the Seljuk age, but the city remained a functioning, prosperous stop.

The Ottoman era also shaped the streets you walk today, with their fountains, mosque courtyards, and stone houses. And when the empire ended, Aksaray’s position at the crossroads made it one of the first places the new Republic’s administrators reached for, a continuity that runs from the caravanserais to the bus station.

The Republic and the Exchange

The twentieth century brought transformation and loss. After the First World War and the founding of the Republic, the Greek Orthodox population of the region, centuries old in towns like Guzelyurt, left under the population exchange of the 1920s, and the stone houses and churches they built passed to new families.

The architectural result is the quiet, lovely townscape of Guzelyurt today, where empty churches and rock-cut monasteries stand among lived-in houses. The demographic change left a visible mark, and the region’s museums and monuments now tell the story of both communities honestly.

The modern city grew quickly in the Republican decades. Aksaray was briefly a province, was merged with Nigde for administrative reasons in 1933, and regained its provincial status in 1989. The energy of that revival is visible everywhere, in new streets, new parks, and a university that has brought a young, ambitious generation to the city.

Aksaray Culture Today

The culture of modern Aksaray is the culture of Anatolia at its most sociable. Life orbits the market, the tea garden, and the mosque, and the day is measured in glasses of cay shared with neighbors. Strangers are welcomed with the reflexive hospitality of the plateau.

The market days are the best introduction. Stalls of produce, cheese, and textiles fill the old quarter, and the bargaining is good-natured theater. Food is the other pillar: soups and dumplings in winter, grilled trout in the valley, and the long breakfast tables that turn mornings into events.

What visitors notice most is the pace. Aksaray is not a city that performs for tourists, which is precisely its charm. People are curious, generous, and unhurried, and a conversation started at a tea garden can easily become an afternoon, which is how the region has always operated.

Festivals and Traditions

Aksaray’s calendar carries the rhythms of the Islamic year and the seasons. The commemoration days of Somuncu Baba draw crowds in spring, when the tomb complex fills with pilgrims and the city holds cultural events around his memory.

Spring also brings Hıdırellez, the festival of renewal that Anatolians have celebrated since before Islam arrived, with picnics, music, and wishes made beside water. Summer brings the valley to life with walks and trout lunches, and autumn harvest work turns the surrounding fields gold.

For visitors, the practical advice is to check what falls during your stay. A pilgrimage day or a festival morning transforms the city, and being present for one is the fastest way to feel the layers of this history as a living culture rather than a museum.

Frequently asked questions

What is Aksaray best known for historically?

Aksaray is known as a Silk Road crossroads with magnificent thirteenth-century Seljuk caravanserais, most famously at Sultanhani. It also surrounds a nine-thousand-year-old Neolithic settlement at Asikli Hoyuk, and its valleys hold hundreds of Byzantine rock-cut churches, making it a compact summary of Anatolian history.

Is Aksaray worth visiting beyond the monuments?

Yes. The modern city’s culture, its markets, tea gardens, and Sufi pilgrimage sites, is the reason many travelers extend their stay. The tomb complex of Somuncu Baba, the leaning minaret downtown, and the unhurried, hospitable pace of daily life make it a living town rather than a sightseeing stop.

How does Aksaray compare with Goreme in Cappadocia?

Aksaray is quieter, cheaper, and richer in Seljuk and Silk Road history, while Goreme is the center of the fairy-chimney landscape and balloon tourism. The two sit about an hour and a half apart, and the best trip takes in both, using each as a base for its own corner of the region.

All Over Information

The All Over Information editorial team researches and writes practical English-language guides to Turkey. Facts are checked against official and local sources before publication, prices are published as dated ranges rather than quotes, and guides are revised when things change. We accept no sponsored posts, paid placements or paid links.