Tunceli (Dersim)

Turkey / Tunceli /
 city, capital city of state/province/region
Tunceli (pronounced [tundʒeli], meaning "Bronze Land" in Turkish, (Kurdish: Mamekî, Zazaki: Mamekiye); is a city in Turkey. It is the capital of Tunceli Province, located in the middle of Eastern Anatolia Region. The former name of Tunceli was Mamiki, then Kalan.
The city has a population of 31,469, and the district, 35,898, mostly kurdish people.

During the Ottoman Empire, Tunceli (then known as Kalan) was a part of the region named Dersim. In 1847 Dersim was declared a sanjak (a historical administrative unit smaller than the province) . The capital of the sanjak was Hozat. During the Republican period Tunceli Province was established in 1935. In 1946 the former town of Kalan was renamed as Tunceli and it was declared as the capital city of the province.
Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunceli
Nearby cities:
Coordinates:   39°4'48"N   39°32'10"E

Comments

  • The history of the province stretches back to antiquity. It has been mentioned as 'Daranalis' by Ptolemy, and seemingly, it was referred to as 'Daranis' before him. One theory as to the origin of the name associates with the Persian Emperor Darius. The area that would become Tunceli province formed part of Urartu, Media, the Achaemenid Empire, and the Greater Armenian region of Sophene. Sophene was later contested by the Roman and Parthian Empires and by their respective successors, the Byzantine and Sassanid Empires. Arabs invaded in the 7th century, and Seljuq Turks in the 11th. As of the end of the 19th century, the region (called "Dersim") was included in the Ottoman sancak (subprovince) of Hozat, depending the city and the province of Mamuret-ül Aziz (Elazığ today), with the exception of the actual district of Pülümür, which depended on the neighboring sancak of Erzincan, then a part of the Erzurum Province. This status continued through the first years of the Republic of Turkey, until 1936 when the name of the province ("Dersim") was changed to Tunceli, literally 'the land of bronze' in Turkish (tunç meaning 'bronze' and el (in this context) meaning 'land') after the Dersim Rebellion. The center of the province has been fixed in the town of Kalan and the district of Pülümür has been added within the boundaries of the new province. The Dersim rebellion was an uprising against the Turkish government in the Dersim region According to official report of 4. General Ispectorate, 13,160 civilians were killed by the Turkish Army and 11.818 people were taken into exile, depopulating the province.According to Dersimi, many tribesmen are shot to death after surrender, women and children were locked into haysheds and fired.According to McDowall, 40.000 people were killed.According to diaspora Kurdish sources, over 70,000 people were killed. A key component of the Turkification process was the policy of massive population resettlement, a result of the 1934 law on resettlement, a policy targeting the region of Dersim as one of its first test cases with disastrous consequences for the local population. "The rebellion was clearly caused by provoking. It caused the most violent tortures that were ever seen in a rebellion in the Republic years. Those that didn't take place in the rebellion and also the families of the rebels were also tortured." says a jurist author Hüseyin Aygün in his book titled Dersim 1938 and Obligatory Settlement