Kayseri

The city's first centre was not here but at Kültepe, a few kilometres to the north-east, where a Bronze Age town called Kanesh hosted a colony of Assyrian merchants around 1900 BC; their clay tablets are the oldest written documents found in Anatolia. Later the site under Mount Erciyes was Mazaca, capital of the kings of Cappadocia, renamed Caesarea in honour of Augustus and taken into the Roman Empire in AD 17.

Caesarea became one of the great cities of Christian Anatolia. Basil of Caesarea, a Church Father, was bishop here in the fourth century and founded a hospital and poorhouse outside the walls that grew into a new town. Arab raids from the seventh century onwards forced the population back behind the fortifications, and the dark stone citadel took its present form under Byzantine and then Seljuk rule.

After the Seljuk conquest the city became one of the sultanate's principal centres, rich enough to fill itself with mosques, madrasas, hospitals and the domed tomb towers, kümbets, that are its architectural signature. The Mongols, the Karamanids, the Mamluks and finally the Ottomans succeeded them. Ottoman Kayseri lived on caravan trade, wool and cured meat, with a large Armenian and Greek population working in its crafts and commerce until the upheavals of the early 20th century. After 1923 the republic placed a big aircraft factory and textile mills here, and from the 1980s family firms turned the city into one of Anatolia's industrial success stories.

Kayseri's reputation across Turkey is commercial: its merchants are proverbially shrewd, and jokes about a Kayserili's skill in a bargain are told everywhere, usually with respect. Business is done through family firms, long relationships and a good deal of tea, and the city's industrialists fund mosques, schools and university buildings as a matter of course.

It is also a conservative and observant place, among the most religious of Turkey's big cities, where the fast is widely kept in Ramadan and Friday prayers fill the squares. Family life is central, weddings are large, and neighbourhood ties remain strong even in the new estates.

The architectural heritage is Seljuk above all — the carved portals, the stone tomb towers, the hospital complex — and the city is proud that Mimar Sinan, the great Ottoman architect of the 16th century, was born in the nearby village of Ağırnas. The old quarters of Talas keep the stone houses and churches of the Greek and Armenian communities who lived here until the early 20th century.

Everyday culture centres on food and the mountain. Erciyes is the city's emblem, on its badges and in its songs, and weekends in winter mean the slopes while summer means picnics on the lower pastures. Football is followed keenly, and the carpets, copper and cured meats of the bazaar are as much part of local identity as the monuments.

About 1.4 million people live in the metropolitan province, the great majority of them in the continuous city made up of the districts of Melikgazi, Kocasinan and Talas. Housing is mostly in apartment blocks, with newer estates spreading west and south towards the mountain, and the old stone houses surviving in pockets of the centre and in Talas.

The economy is unusually broad for an Anatolian city. Furniture is the best-known industry — Kayseri produces a large share of Turkey's output — along with cable, steel, textiles, food processing and one of the country's older aircraft plants. Its organised industrial zones employ tens of thousands, and the city's firms export widely. Universities add a large student population.

Daily rhythms are those of a working city: early shifts, lunch in a lokanta, tea breaks through the afternoon, and evenings at home or in the parks and shopping centres. Weekends bring the mountain, picnics in the pine woods and breakfast in Talas. Persistent concerns are air quality in the still, cold days of winter, when coal heating and the surrounding hills trap smoke, water supply on a dry plain, and the earthquake risk of an Anatolian city, which has driven much rebuilding of older housing.

Kayseri is one of the serious eating cities of Anatolia, and two of its products are sold across Turkey. Pastırma is beef cured with salt, pressed, air-dried and coated in çemen, a thick paste of fenugreek, garlic and hot paprika; it is sliced very thin, eaten with bread, cooked with eggs or laid over beans. Sucuk, the spiced dry sausage, comes from the same butchers' tradition and the same shopfronts near the bazaar.

Kayseri mantısı are dumplings small enough that a spoon should hold several, filled with minced meat and served under garlic yoghurt with butter and red pepper; making them very small is a point of pride. Yağlama layers thin flatbreads with minced meat and yoghurt; cıvıklı is a thin dough baked with meat and tomato; and pastırmalı kuru fasulye, white beans cooked with cured beef, is a staple lunch. Soups, lamb grills and stuffed vegetables fill out the everyday table.

Sweets lean on nuts and syrup, with nevzine, a syrup-soaked tahini and walnut pastry, the local speciality, and the markets sell walnuts, dried apricots, pekmez and honey from the plateau. The drink to look for is gilaburu, a sharp juice pressed from the red berries of the guelder rose, sweetened with pekmez and served very cold.