Adana’s name has been spoken for over four millennia
Southern Turkey’s Adana sits on the Seyhan River about 35 kilometers inland from the Mediterranean, capital of its province and heart of Cilicia’s roughly six-million-person region. Classical armies prized the Taurus passes nearby; the toponym itself is older than four thousand years of use.
Explanations for the ancient name vary. One links it to an Indo-European phrase meaning on the river, sharing a root with the Danube, Don and Dnieper. Greco-Roman legend credited Adanus, a son of Uranus, who founded the town beside a river named for his brother Sarus; others see a tie to Homer's Danaoi, and Ottoman-era Muslims traced it to an Abbasid governor appointed by Harun al-Rashid. The modern city counts about 1.8 million people in its metro districts, and trains link it to Tarsus and Mersin.
Around 1335 BC the Luwian and Hurrian kingdom of Kizzuwatna governed Adana under Hittite protection. After the Hittite collapse the Denyen sea peoples held the plain until about 900 BC, and the Neo-Hittite state of Quwê then centered on the city. Greek settlers arrived in the 8th century BC, the Mopsos dynasty made Adana its capital, and inscriptions from nearby Mopsuestia pair hieroglyphic Luwian with Phoenician. A Kingdom of Cilicia arose in 612 BC, fell to Persia in 549 BC, and saw Alexander march through the Cilician Gates in 333 BC; under the Seleucids the townsfolk renamed their home Antioch on Sarus.
Christianity took hold early, and bishop Paulinus attended the Council of Nicaea in 325. In April 625 the emperor Heraclius charged across Justinian's bridge, now Taşköprü, to beat a Sasanian army at the Battle of Sarus. The Umayyads took the city in 704, the Abbasids resettled it between 758 and 760, and it flourished under Harun al-Rashid. Seljuks, Armenians and Byzantines traded control from 1084 onward, and Venetian and Genoese merchants came to its markets.
In the 14th century Ramazan Bey made Adana capital of the Ramadanid emirate, absorbed by Selim I into the Ottoman state in 1517 and ruled directly from 1608. Egypt's Muhammad Ali held Cilicia after 1833. By 1900 industry had pushed the population past 107,000, including some 30,000 Armenians, many of whom died in the pogroms of April 1909.
Source: Adana
