Kahramanmaras

Marash, officially known as Kahramanmaras, is a city in the Mediterranean Region of Turkey and the administrative center of Kahramanmaras Province. Before 1973, Kahramanmaras was named Maras. The city lies on a plain at the foot of the Ahir Dagi and has a population of 1,112,634 as of 2017.The city is near the southern outlet of three important passes through the Taurus Mountains.

Kahramanmaras was the capital of the Hittite kingdom of Gurgum (c. 12th century BCE). It was known to the 8th-century-BCE conquering Assyrians as Markasi and, later, to the Romans as Germanicia Caesarea. The Arabs conquered it about 645 CE and used it as a base for their incursions into Asia Minor (Anatolia). The town, which was destroyed several times in the Arab-Byzantine-Armenian struggles, was rebuilt by the Umayyad caliph Muswiyah I (7th century) and fortified (c. 800) by the ʿAbbssid caliph Harun al-Rashid. It was briefly occupied by Crusaders in 1097 and passed on to the Seljuq Turks in the 12th century. It was incorporated into the Ottoman Empire under Sultan Selim I about 1515. With the surrounding province, it was occupied by France in 1919 but returned to Turkey two years later.