Southeast Anatolia (Maras-Valley)
Situation and Importance
The provincial capital of Maras stands at the southern foot of Maras Taurus in the foothills of the Maras mountain chain. The prefix Kahraman means "heroic" and refers to the resistance of the local population to the
English and French occupation during the Turkish War of Liberation. Maras is primarily a market town for local produce, with the main crop being cotton which grows on the plain. The mountainous hinterland, the Maras-Taurus, has traces of small Ice Age glaciers on its summits and the population is sparse even in the long Betiz and Nuruhak valleys. Before the First World War, many of the villages were settled by Armenians (Süleymanli = Zeytun). The story of their forcible eviction through Maras and Aleppo into the desert at Deir es Zor is told in Franz Werfel's "The Forty Days of Musa Dagh". A fierce cold wind sometimes blows through this region. Similar to the Adriatic bora, it occurs when cold and warm Mediterranean air currents meet, bringing bitterly cold storms to the Maras valley.
History
Assyrian texts refer to the town as the center of the late Hittite kingdom of Gurgum. Its heyday was around 800 B.C., but it was overrun and destroyed by Sargon II (721-705 B.C.). In the first century under Byzantine rule, when the town was known as Germaniceia, it became a fortress on the Thugur line, the disputed boundary in southwestern Anatolia between the Byzantine Empire and Arab khalifs. Around 962 large groups of Armenian refugees, who were fleeing from the Seljuks, settled in the region.
When the Byzantines were defeated by the Arabs, one of the Armenian town governors Philaretes enlisted the support of a Crusader army to establish an independent state. Maras changed hands a number of times and at one time came under the rule of Dulkadir-Beys, and from 1515 it was a part of the Ottoman Empire. Between 1832 and 1840, Ibrahim Pasa brought the town under the control of the Egyptian governor Mehmed Ali.
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