Where to Stay in Elbistan, Kahramanmaraş

What is Elbistan known for?

In 1277 the Mamluks under Baybars broke a Mongol army at the Battle of Elbistan, and sixty years later Zeyneddin Karaca Bey took the town and made it the seat of the Beylik of Dulkadir. Lignite carries it too. The Elbistan coalfield feeds the Afşin-Elbistan power stations over at Afşin, which is why the district reads as an energy district before a historical one.

What are the main landmarks in Elbistan?

The district's one museum sits in the town. Elbistan Şehir Museum keeps the local record, the plain, the beyliks and the town's own past, in the place it belongs to. Older evidence lies out at Karahüyük, where a stele cut with Anatolian hieroglyphic writing was dug up in 1947 and dated to the 12th century BC.

The Elbistan coalfield is the other landmark, though it is one nobody visits.

What is the history of Elbistan?

The name has been through several tongues. Antiquity knew the place as Plasta and as Plastentia, Armenian writers of the early 11th century wrote Ablasta, and Baldric of Dol has the form Ablistan holding until the 15th century. Old Anatolian Turkish carried the variants alongside it.

Muhammad ibn Iyas set the word down as Albistan, Alaüddevle Bozkurt Bey used Elbistan in the chancery documents of the Dulkadirids, and Arabic reads it as Al-Bustan, the orchard. Modern occupation of the Elbistan plain began in the mid-10th century, when Armenian settlers built the town into the chief place on the plain and, before the 11th century was out, walled it against Turkish raiders and gave it a bishop. The First Crusade came through in 1097.

With the Byzantine Empire recovering ground across Anatolia, Peter Aliphas was installed as governor of Plastentia, and the reversal that Matthew of Edessa records was total: Yaqub Arslan, ruler of Cappadocia, uprooted the Christian townspeople together with the people of Lykandos and Gaihan. Baidju and the Mongols sacked the town in 1256. Baybars beat a Mongol force at the Battle of Elbistan in 1277, after which the place sat on the Mamluk northern frontier.

Zeyneddin Karaca Bey took it in 1337 and made it, with Marash, the centre of the Beylik of Dulkadir. The Dulkadirids held the region for 178 years, paying homage to the Mamluks and fighting the Karamandids in their interest while angling for more of their own. The Ottoman Empire ended that in 1515.

Ottoman clerks then filed the district as vilayet-i Türkmân, and Evliya Çelebi, writing his Seyahatnâme in the 17th century, put Turkmens out of Bukhara in the mountains and towns, with local chiefs left some autonomy around Haticepınar and Kasanlı.

Where is Elbistan?

Elbistan holds the plain that carries its name. The Elbistan plain opens out in the north of Kahramanmaraş Province, with mountain country around it that Evliya Çelebi set down as Turkmen ground, and the district reaches a long way past the built-up part in every direction. Karahüyük stands out on that farmland to the northwest.

Ninety-two neighbourhoods are scattered across it, which makes Elbistan District far larger than the town at its middle.

What is the climate of Elbistan?

The Köppen scheme files Elbistan as Dsa. That means a dry-summer continental year: hot rainless months over the open plain, cold ones after them, and a district that dries out rather than clouding over. Air is the local argument.

Smoke from the Afşin-Elbistan power stations and from landfill drifts across the plain, and Ali Öztunç, an opposition MP, said in 2020 that the oldest of the plants, Afşin-Elbistan A, was still running without filters.

How do you get to Elbistan?

Every approach is by road. Kahramanmaraş, the provincial seat away to the south, is the usual starting point, and the run up to Elbistan crosses district country before the town shows itself on the plain. Afşin is the near neighbour, close enough that its power stations and the Elbistan coalfield make one working landscape with the town.

The stele site at Karahüyük is nine kilometres northwest of the centre. Past that, the villages of Elbistan District are car country.