Nigde

Nigde is a town and the capital of Nigde Province in the Central Anatolia region of Turkey at an elevation of 1,299 m. In 2019 the population was 362.861.The town is located between the volcanic Melandiz Mountains, which include the Mount Hasan Stratovolcano near the city of Aksaray to the north, and the Nigde Massif to the south-southeast. The massif is a Metamorphic rock dome that contains abandoned antimony and iron mines. Several marble quarries are currently active in the pure white crystalline marble of the massif.

The city is thought by some historians to be on the site of Nakida, mentioned in Hittite texts. After the decline of ancient Tyana (10th century), Nigde and nearby Bor emerged as the towns controlling the mountain pass, a vital link on the northern trade route from Cilicia to inner Anatolia and Sinope (modern Sinop on the Black Sea coast. A prosperous and important city of the Seljuq sultanate of Rūm, Nigde by 1333 was, nevertheless, in ruins (probably because of the wars between the Mongols and Karaman, a Turkmen principality that succeeded the sultanate of Rum) when the North African traveler Ibn Baṭṭuṭah visited there. Thereafter it changed hands among the Turkmen principalities of Eretna, Karaman, and Burhanettin before its absorption into the Ottoman Empire in the second half of the 15th century.