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Kozan () is a city in Adana Province, Turkey. The Kilgen stream, a tributary of the Ceyhan River (formerly Jibun or Pyramus), flows through the city ,crossing the plain south into the Mediterranen Sea
Its population has grown rapidly in recent years, from 54,451 in 1990 to 75,833 in 2000 (census figures).
Economy
The great heats compel the inhabitants to desert it during the summer months. It is surrounded by vineyards and groves of cypress and sycamore trees.
History
Sis (Armenian: Սիս, also known as Sissu, Sision, later Flavias or Flaviopolis) has had an important place in Armenian Apostolic Church ecclesiastical history. It is also a Roman Catholic titular see of Cilicia Secunda. Nothing is known of its first ancient name and history, except that Flavias is said to be identical with Sis. Lequien (II, 899) gives the names of several of its bishops: Alexander, later Bishop of Jerusalem and founder of the famous library of the Holy Sepulchre in the third century; Nicetas, present at the Council of Nicaea (325); John, who lived in 451; Andrew in the sixth century; George (681); and Eustratus, Patriarch of Antioch about 868. If the identification of Flavias with Sis, which is probable, be admitted, it will be found that it is first mentioned in Theodoret's life of St. Simeon Stylites.
In the Middle Ages it was the religious centre of Christian Armenians, at least until the catholicos established himself at Etschmiadzin.
In 302, Gregory the Illuminator was consecrated the first Catholicos of Armenia, but transferred his see to Vagarshabad (Echmiadzin), whence, after the fall of the Arsacids, it passed to Tovin.
In 704, Sis was besieged by the Arabs, but relieved by the Byzantines. The Abbasid caliph al-Mutawakkil took it and refortified it, but it soon returned to Byzantine hands. It was rebuilt in 1186 by Leo II, king of the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia, who made the city the capital of the Kingdom of Lesser Armenia (from 1186 till 1375). The catholicate returned to Sis in 1294, and remained there 150 years.
In 1266 it was captured and burned by the Egyptians temporarily; in 1375, Sis was taken and demolished by the Mamluc Sultan of Egypt, and it has never recovered its prosperity, not even when it passed into the power of the Ottomans.
In 1441, Sis having fallen from its high estate, the Armenian clergy proposed to remove the see, and on the refusal of the actual Catholicos, Gregory IX, installed a rival at Echmiadzin, who, as soon as Selim I had conquered Greater Armenia, became the more widely accepted of the two by the Armenian church in the Ottoman Empire. The Catholicus of Sis maintained himself nevertheless, with under his jurisdiction several bishops, numerous villages and convents, and was supported in his pretensions by the Pope up to the middle of the 19th century, when the patriarch Nerses, declaring finally for Echmiadzin, carried the government with him. In 1885, Sis tried to declare Echmiadzin schismatic, and in 1895 its clergy took it on themselves to elect a Catholicus without reference to the patriarch; but the Ottoman Empire annulled the election, and only allowed it six years later on Sis renouncing its pretensions to independence. That Catholicus had the right to prepare the sacred myron (oil) and to preside over a synod, but was in fact not more than a metropolitan, and regarded by many Armenians as schismatic. Under Ottoman rule Sis was the chief town of the caza (district) of the same name in the vilayet (province) of Adana and numbered circa 1900 4000 inhabitants, most of whom Armenians. Ruins of churches, convents, castles and palaces may be seen on all sides.
The lofty castle and the monastery and church built by Leo II, and containing the coronation chair of the kings of Lesser Armenia, were noteworthy in the early 20th century.
The Armenian poulation of Sis was deported during the Armenian Genocide in 1915, and the monastery of St. Sophia of Sis, home of the Catholicade of Sis destroyed.
See also
References
External links
- http://www.kozan.gov.tr/
- Armenian History and Presence in Sis
Armenian Apostolic Church | History of Armenia | Cities in Turkey | Former capitals of Armenia
"Kozan, Adana"