Ancient history Cappadocia was known as
Hatti in the late
Bronze Age, and was the homeland of the
Hittite power centred at
Hattusa. After the fall of the Hittite Empire, with the decline of the Syro-Cappadocians (
Mushki) after their defeat by the
Lydian king
Croesus in the 6th century BC, Cappadocia was ruled by a sort of
feudal aristocracy, dwelling in strong castles and keeping the peasants in a servile condition, which later made them apt to foreign slavery. It was included in the third
Persian satrapy in the division established by
Darius but continued to be governed by rulers of its own, none apparently supreme over the whole country and all more or less tributaries of the
Great King.
Kingdom of Cappadocia After ending the Persian Empire,
Alexander the Great tried to rule the area through one of his military commanders. But
Ariarathes, previously satrap of the region, declared himself king of the Cappadocians. As Ariarathes I (332–322 BC), he was a successful ruler, and he extended the borders of the Cappadocian Kingdom as far as to the
Black Sea. The kingdom of Cappadocia lived in peace until the death of Alexander. The previous empire was then divided into many parts, and Cappadocia fell to
Eumenes. His claims were made good in 322 BC by the regent
Perdiccas, who crucified Ariarathes; but in the dissensions which brought about Eumenes's death,
Ariarathes II, the adopted son of Ariarathes I, recovered his inheritance and left it to a line of successors, who mostly bore the name of the founder of the
dynasty. Persian colonists in the Cappadocian kingdom, cut off from their co-religionists in Iran proper, continued to practice
Zoroastrianism.
Strabo, observing them in the first century BC, records (XV.3.15) that these "fire kindlers" possessed many "holy places of the Persian Gods", as well as
fire temples. Strabo relates, "noteworthy enclosures; and in their midst there is an altar, on which there is a large quantity of ashes and where the magi keep the fire ever burning."
Roman and early Christian period , Cappadocia The Cappadocians, supported by Rome against
Mithridates VI of Pontus, elected a native lord,
Ariobarzanes, to succeed (93 BC). In the same year,
Armenian troops under
Tigranes the Great entered Cappadocia, dethroned king Ariobarzanes and crowned
Gordios as the new
client-king of Cappadocia, creating a buffer zone against the encroaching Romans. When Rome deposed the Pontic and Armenian kings, the rule of Ariobarzanes was established (63 BC). In
Caesar's civil war, Cappadocia was first for
Pompey, then for
Caesar, then for
Antony, and finally,
Octavian. The Ariobarzanes dynasty came to an end, a Cappadocian nobleman
Archelaus was given the throne, by favour first of Antony and then of Octavian, and maintained tributary independence until AD 17, when the emperor
Tiberius, whom he had angered, summoned him to Rome and reduced Cappadocia to a Roman province. In 70 AD,
Vespasian joined
Armenia Minor to Cappadocia, and made the combined province a frontier bulwark. It remained, under various provincial redistributions, part of the
Eastern Empire for centuries. In 314, Cappadocia was the largest province of the Roman Empire, and was part of the
Diocese of Pontus. In 371, the western part of the Cappadocia province was divided into
Cappadocia Prima, with its capital at Caesarea (modern-day Kayseri); and
Cappadocia Secunda, with its capital at
Tyana. By 386, the region to the east of Caesarea had become part of
Armenia Secunda, while the northeast had become part of
Armenia Prima. Cappadocia largely consisted of major estates, owned by the Roman emperors or wealthy local families. The Cappadocian provinces became more important in the latter part of the 4th century, as the Romans were involved with the
Sasanian Empire over control of
Mesopotamia and "Armenia beyond the Euphrates". Cappadocia, now well into the Roman era, still retained a significant
Iranian character; Stephen Mitchell notes that "many inhabitants of Cappadocia were of
Persian descent and Iranian fire worship is attested as late as 465", and the area also contained a sizeable Armenian population since antiquity. For most of the
Byzantine era it remained relatively undisturbed by the conflicts in the area with the Sasanian Empire, but the
Persian Wars of the 610s and 620s placed Cappadocia on the frontline for the first time since the first century. The exact date of arrival of Christianity in uncertain, but latest from the third century it was firmly established in society and the Church was fully developed. The
Cappadocian Fathers of the 4th century were integral to much of early
Christian philosophy. It produced, among other people,
John of Cappadocia,
Patriarch of Constantinople from 517 to 520, and
Macrina, an early champion of women's monasticism. The region suffered
famine in 368 described as "the most severe ever remembered" by
Gregory of Nazianzus: in Cappadocia The city was in distress and there was no source of assistance [...] The hardest part of all such distress is the insensibility and insatiability of those who possess supplies [...] Such are the buyers and sellers of corn [...] by his word and advice
Basil's] open the stores of those who possessed them, and so, according to the Scripture, dealt food to the hungry and satisfied the poor with bread [...] He gathered together the victims of the famine [...] and obtaining contributions of all sorts of food which can relieve famine, set before them basins of soup and such meat as was found preserved among us, on which the poor live [...] Such was our young furnisher of corn, and second
Joseph [...] [But unlike Joseph, Basil's] services were gratuitous and his succour of the famine gained no profit, having only one object, to win kindly feelings by kindly treatment, and to gain by his rations of corn the heavenly blessings. This is similar to another account by
Gregory of Nyssa that
Basil "ungrudgingly spent upon the poor his patrimony even before he was a priest, and most of all in the time of the famine, during which [Basil] was a ruler of the Church, though still a priest in the rank of presbyters; and afterwards did not hoard even what remained to him". As a result of the Byzantine military campaigns and the
Seljuk invasion of Armenia, the Armenians spread into Cappadocia and eastward from
Cilicia into the mountainous areas of northern
Syria and
Mesopotamia, and the
Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia was eventually formed. This immigration was increased further after the decline of the local imperial power and the establishment of the
Crusader States following the
Fourth Crusade. To the crusaders, Cappadocia was
terra Hermeniorum, the land of the Armenians, due to the large number of Armenians settled there. In the 9th–11th centuries, the region comprised the themes of
Charsianon with its capital at the eponymous city and
Cappadocia, which had first its capital in
Nyssa and then at Koron, after Nyssa had been sacked by the Arabs in 838. By the mid-tenth century, the region was again reorganised as much of the no-men's land was resettled, especially around the area of Larissa,
Tzamandos, and
Lykandos. After the Byzantine reconquests in the East finished, Cappadocia was again removed from the frontier and an increasingly demilitarised region in the eleventh century. , "Church of the Buckle"
Turkish Cappadocia Following the
Battle of Manzikert in 1071,
Turkish clans under the leadership of the
Seljuks began settling in
Anatolia. With the rise of Turkish power in Anatolia, Cappadocia slowly became a tributary to the Turkish states that were established to the east and to the west; some of the native population converted to Islam with the rest forming the remaining
Cappadocian Greek population. By the end of the early 12th century,
Anatolian Seljuks had established their sole dominance over the region. With the decline and the fall of the
Konya-based Seljuks in the second half of the 13th century, they were gradually replaced by successive Turkic ruled states: the
Karaman-based
Beylik of
Karaman and then the
Ottoman Empire. Cappadocia remained part of the Ottoman Empire until 1922, when it became part of the modern state of
Turkey. In the early 18th century, a fundamental change occurred in between when a new urban center,
Nevşehir, was founded by a
grand vizier who was a native of the locality (
Nevşehirli Damat İbrahim Pasha), to serve as regional capital, a role the city continues to assume to this day. In the meantime many former Cappadocians had shifted to a Turkish dialect (written in
Greek alphabet,
Karamanlıca). Where the
Greek language was maintained (Sille, villages near Kayseri, Pharasa town and other nearby villages), it became heavily influenced by the surrounding Turkish. This dialect of
Eastern Roman Greek is known as
Cappadocian Greek. Following the foundation of Turkey in 1922, those who still identified with this pre-Islamic culture of Cappadocia were
required to leave, so this language is now only spoken in Greece by the descendants of the few who did not shift to Modern Greek.
Church Cappadocia Church (Turkish:
Kapadokya Kilisesi) is a Christian church and local congregation in Avanos, a town in Nevşehir Province in Cappadocia. The church holds Turkish-language worship services within a Protestant theological framework, according to its own statements. Several online travel and business directories list it as one of the places of worship and visitation in Avanos. ==Modern tourism==