Sivas is one of the most historically layered cities in Turkey, a place where Seljuk scholarship, Ottoman provincial life, and the birth of the modern republic all left their mark within a few hundred meters of each other. Understanding those layers transforms a visit from sightseeing into something closer to time travel. This guide traces the city’s story and the culture that grew from it.
Ancient Roots: From Sebasteia to Byzantium
Long before the Seljuks, the site of Sivas was an important city. In antiquity it was known as Sebasteia, a name honoring the Roman emperor Augustus, and it grew into a significant regional center under Roman and later Byzantine rule.
Christianity left deep traces: Sebasteia was a bishopric, and the city and its surroundings are associated with early saints and martyrs, including the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste, soldiers venerated across the Christian world for refusing to renounce their faith.
By the Middle Ages, the Byzantine city was a frontier stronghold against the Turkic advance from the east. When it finally fell to the Seljuks in the eleventh century, it changed identity but not importance, stepping into a new role as a capital of the Anatolian Seljuk state.
The Seljuk Capital: A Golden Age
Under the Anatolian Seljuks, Sivas became one of the most important cities of the Islamic East, a center of trade, learning, and monumental architecture. Caravan routes from Persia, the Caucasus, and the Mediterranean converged here, and the city’s wealth paid for stone on a grand scale.
The great building age climaxed in a single astonishing year, 1271, when three medreses rose within streets of each other: Gök Medrese, Çifte Minareli, and Buruciye, each financed by a different patron and each a masterpiece of carved stone.
Earlier still, Sultan İzzeddin Keykavus I built the Şifaiye Medrese in 1217 as a hospital, and his tomb still stands within it. The concentration of Seljuk monuments in Sivas is rivaled in Anatolia only by a handful of other cities, and it defines the old town to this day.
Scholars, Sufis, and the Medrese World
The medreses of Sivas were not monuments but working universities, where students boarded, studied, and argued theology, law, and medicine under the supervision of learned teachers. The city was a node in the intellectual network of the Seljuk and later the Ottoman world.
Sufism flourished alongside the schools. Sivas was home to dervish lodges and to teachers whose influence spread far beyond the city, and the region around it remains one of the heartlands of Anatolian Alevi culture, with its own poetry, music, and ritual traditions.
The shadow of that culture still falls on the city. Folk poets and bağlama players from the Sivas region, most famously Aşık Veysel of Şarkışla, carried the medrese tradition of words and wisdom into the modern age, and their songs are sung across Turkey.
Ottoman Sivas: A Provincial Capital
When the Ottomans absorbed the region, Sivas became the seat of a large province, a role it kept for centuries. The city governed a vast territory of the eastern plateau, and its governors, many of them powerful viziers, left their own buildings behind.
The Ottoman centuries brought the city’s great covered market life, hans for traveling merchants, baths, and the layered stone streets that still define the old town. Sivas was a center of crafts, especially textiles and copperwork, and its bazaar grew rich on the plateau’s trade.
The Grand Mosque, though older, remained the city’s religious heart, while new mosques and fountains updated the skyline. Ottoman Sivas was conservative, devout, and prosperous, a world away from the coastal cities of the empire.
The Road to 1919: War and Occupation
The First World War shattered the old order. The Ottoman Empire collapsed, and in 1919 the victorious powers moved to partition Anatolia, with the lands around Sivas among those contested. The city, like the rest of the country, faced an uncertain and dangerous future.
In this atmosphere, the national movement gathered. Regional congresses across Anatolia prepared the ground, and Sivas, central, defensible, and important, was chosen as the site for the decisive gathering of September 1919.
The choice was deliberate. From Sivas, the movement could command the plateau, block the route between Istanbul and the east, and rally the provinces. The city’s role was about to become historic.
The Sivas Congress and the Birth of the Republic
From September 4 to 11, 1919, the Sivas Congress met in the stone building of the Sivas Lycée. Mustafa Kemal Pasha, soon to be known as Atatürk, presided, and delegates from across Anatolia debated the future of the country.
The congress declared the nation indivisible, rejected any foreign mandate over Turkish territory, and elected a representative committee to lead the struggle. It was, in effect, the founding assembly of the Turkish republic, and its decisions set the course of the War of Independence.
The building where it all happened survives, preserved as the Atatürk Congress and Ethnography Museum. Standing in the meeting hall, with its period furniture and flags, is one of the most moving historical experiences in Turkey.
The Republic and Modern Sivas
The republic brought Sivas a new identity. The city became a symbol of the national struggle, its name invoked in schoolbooks and speeches, and the congress building was consecrated as a monument to the movement that Atatürk led.
Economically, modern Sivas grew around the railway, cement, and the vast plateau’s resources, while remaining a provincial city with a proud, self-aware culture. The old town was preserved, and the monuments that define it were restored for the generations to come.
Today Sivas balances two histories at once: the medieval city of medreses and caravans, and the modern city that helped found a nation. Both are on display within a few minutes’ walk of each other, which is exactly what makes the place so remarkable.
Folk Culture: Music, Poetry, and the Bağlama
The culture of Sivas is carried in its music. The bağlama, the long-necked lute of Anatolia, is everywhere here, and the tradition of the aşık, the traveling poet-singer, is still alive in the region’s towns and villages.
Aşık Veysel, born in Şarkışla in 1894, is the towering figure of this tradition, a blind poet whose songs about nature, loss, and the land are among the most beloved in Turkish. His grave and a small museum draw visitors from across the country.
Even if you cannot attend a live performance, the tradition is easy to feel: in the tea gardens, on local television, and in the way ordinary conversations about music, memory, and place deepen into poetry.
The Culture of the Table and the Year
Sivas culture also lives in its calendar and its food. The long winters shape everything: the tarhana and kesme made in autumn for the cold months, the soups that anchor the table, and the tea gardens that turn the long afternoons social.
Festivals and commemorations mark the year, with the September anniversary of the congress bringing ceremonies and visitors to the city. Village life beyond the city follows the old rhythms of sowing, harvest, and flock, rhythms that have changed little in centuries.
For the visitor, sharing this culture is easy. Eat where locals eat, take tea where they take it, and let conversations go where they will. Sivas rewards curiosity with warmth, and its culture is genuinely hospitable.
The Congress Building as a Living Monument
The centerpiece of Sivas’s historical culture is the building where the congress met. Restored and museum-ified, it is more than a tourist attraction: it is a place where Turks bring their children to explain where the modern country came from.
The halls are arranged so that visitors move through the story in order, from the occupation of 1919 to the decisions of September and the war that followed. Photographs, documents, and period objects bring the nine days alive in a way that no book quite manages.
Visiting with an open mind, whatever your background, you will feel the weight of the place. This is history not as artifact but as argument: the claim that a nation can be willed into being, made here on the Sivas plateau.
The Forty Martyrs and the Christian Heritage
The Christian centuries of Sivas survive mostly in memory, but that memory is deep. The city was the center of the cult of the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste, Roman soldiers who, according to tradition, were martyred on a frozen lake near the city in the early fourth century for refusing to renounce their faith.
Their story spread across the entire Christian world, and churches from Armenia to Western Europe were dedicated to them, making Sebaste one of the most revered pilgrimage names of late antiquity. Byzantine coins, seals, and chronicles all attest to the city’s continuing importance.
Today the Christian monuments are gone or transformed, but the Forty Martyrs are remembered in art and liturgy wherever Christianity is practiced. For the visitor, the story adds a layer of meaning to the ancient history of the city and the plateau.
Sivas remembers its history publicly. The anniversary of the congress in September brings official ceremonies, and the city’s identity is tightly bound to the events of 1919, with Atatürk’s image and words present in squares, schools, and public buildings.
Beyond the official calendar, the city’s cultural life runs on the plateau’s rhythms: spring pasture festivals in the mountain districts, autumn harvest markets, and the constant hum of the tea gardens. Folk music evenings and poetry events keep the aşık tradition in public view.
For travelers, the practical upshot is that Sivas is a living city rather than an open-air museum. History is not confined to the monuments; it is in the conversation, the music, and the food, and it is available to anyone willing to slow down and take part.
Frequently asked questions
Why is Sivas important in Turkish history?
Sivas hosted the Sivas Congress of September 1919, where delegates from across Anatolia declared the nation indivisible and rejected foreign mandates under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Pasha. The decisions made there set the course for the War of Independence and the founding of the republic.
What are the main historical monuments in Sivas?
The Seljuk medreses, especially Gök, Çifte Minareli, and Şifaiye, the 1197 Grand Mosque, and the Atatürk Congress and Ethnography Museum are the essentials. The UNESCO-listed mosque and hospital of Divriği lie about 180 kilometers east of the city.
What is Aşık Veysel’s connection to Sivas?
Aşık Veysel, the most famous folk poet of modern Turkey, was born in Şarkışla, a town in Sivas province, in 1894. The region’s living tradition of poet-singers, or aşıks, and the bağlama lute are central to its cultural identity.
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.
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