Things to Do in Karaman: Binbir Kilise and the Manazan Caves

--- title: "Karaman travel guide: Binbirkilise, the Taskale rock granaries, Manazan and Ermenek" description: "An honest guide to Karaman: the Byzantine church ruins scattered through a village at the foot of an extinct volcano, hundreds of grain stores cut into a cliff at Taskale and still in use, the stacked cave floors of Manazan, Ermenek where the Karamanid beylik began, and the cave-ripened Divle cheese. The Yunus Emre grave claim, the 1277 Turkish-language decree, how many days, when to go." city: "Karaman" lang: "en" ---

Karaman: the province everyone drives through

Karaman's problem is not its geography. It is its neighbours. Konya sits to the north, Cappadocia to the northeast, the Mediterranean coast to the south. All three are reasons to take a holiday. Karaman is the space in between, the place people drive through on the way to somewhere with a beach or a whirling dervish.

What sits inside those provincial borders does not match that treatment. The Karamanid beylik was founded here and spent two centuries as the most stubborn political force in Anatolia, refusing to be absorbed by Seljuks, Mongols or Ottomans in turn. What they built in the town centre is still standing and still walkable: a madrasa, a mosque, a tomb, a museum, all within a few hundred metres of each other.

Thirty kilometres north, at the foot of an extinct volcano, Byzantine church ruins sit in and among the houses of a working village. Nobody sells tickets. Forty kilometres east there is a cliff face with hundreds of holes cut into it, and people have been putting their wheat in those holes for centuries. Some still do. That last detail is the one worth travelling for, and it is not a reconstruction.

Who this suits: anyone curious about archaeology and early Turkish architecture, anyone who likes walking around empty sites without a rope line, anyone willing to give up a day to a gravel road. Who it does not suit: anyone expecting things to be conveniently clustered. Karaman's sites are spread across the province and the distances are real.

The most common mistake is treating the province as its capital. The centre takes half a day. What Karaman actually pays back is outside it.

Quick answer

Karaman is a province where the centre is finished by lunchtime and everything else scatters in three directions by car, best in spring or autumn.

• Centre: castle, Hatuniye madrasa, museum, Aktekke and the Yunus Emre mosque, all walkable. Half a day.
• North: Binbirkilise and the Kara Dag summit. Half a day to a full day, last stretch unsurfaced.
• East: the Taskale granaries, Manazan and the Incesu cave. One full day.
• Ermenek: far, and the road crosses mountains. A separate day, ideally with an overnight stay.
• Car: effectively required. Buses reach the district towns; the places you want are not in the district towns.
• Food: Divle cave-ripened cheese, dried okra, apples.

1. Karaman Castle

It stands on a mound rising out of an otherwise flat plain, in the middle of town. In a place as level as Karaman, even fifteen metres registers, so you will not need a map to find it.

What you are looking at is the inner citadel. It took its present shape largely under the Karamanids, but the mound beneath it is far older. The castle was not planted on empty ground; it was set on a tell people had already lived on for thousands of years. Sections of wall survive, the towers are partly restored, the inner courtyard is laid out as a park. The restoration is heavy-handed in places, and it is not always obvious where the old stone stops and the concrete starts.

Come for the orientation rather than the masonry. From the top the Karaman plain opens out and the logic of the town becomes visible: water, flat farmland, Kara Dag closing the north, the Taurus range walling off the south. Half an hour is enough. Opening arrangements change, so verify officially.

2. Hatuniye Madrasa

The best single building in the province, and there is no close second. It dates to 1382. The patron was Nefise Sultan, daughter of the Ottoman sultan Murad I and wife of the Karamanid ruler Alaeddin Ali Bey. The building is a direct artefact of that strange era in which the two dynasties were fighting each other and marrying each other at once.

The reason to come is the portal. Geometric and vegetal carving cut into marble, a muqarnas hood, engaged columns either side of the door. To see what happened to Seljuk stonework once the Karamanids inherited it, look at the surface rather than a photograph: there is real depth, the shadows do work, and the motifs repeat without repeating identically.

Inside it is a standard madrasa plan, a courtyard with an iwan and cells around it. It is run under the museum directorate and the courtyard hosts exhibitions and recitals, so it is not a dead building. Twenty minutes covers it, but stand at the door for five of them. Verify access officially.

3. Karaman Museum

It shares a courtyard with the Hatuniye madrasa, so the two are one stop. The museum's real justification is Canhasan, a group of Neolithic mounds about fifteen kilometres northeast of town. The pottery, stone tools and figurines excavated there belong to the first phases of settled life in Anatolia, and this is the serious part of the collection.

The collection itself is modest, and it is more honest to say so upfront. If you arrive with the Museum of Anatolian Civilisations in Ankara as your reference point, this will feel small. Karaman Museum is not a destination in its own right; it is a context supplier. Go in before you drive out to Binbirkilise or Taskale and those places acquire a chronology instead of just being old.

There are Karamanid-period stone and wood pieces, gravestones, and an ethnography section with local textiles and household objects. An hour at most. If you are treating the centre as a half-day walk, start here and continue on foot to Aktekke. Verify hours officially.

4. Aktekke Mosque (Mader-i Mevlana)

The alternative name explains the place. Mader-i Mevlana means the mother of Rumi. Before Rumi's family settled in Konya they spent years in Karaman after leaving Balkh, and his mother Mumine Hatun died here. Her grave is in the mosque's burial enclosure. The mosque was built around 1370 by the Karamanid ruler Alaeddin Ali Bey.

The building stands out through its pale stone and central dome, which is where the name Aktekke, roughly the white lodge, comes from. Inside and outside are both plain. Architecturally it is not the strongest thing in Karaman, but it is the most visited, and the reason is not architectural: a share of the people who travel to Konya for Rumi come here too.

Set your expectations. Next to the shrine in Konya this will feel small and quiet. That is not a defect. Aktekke has not been turned into an operation with a gift shop; it is still a neighbourhood mosque. Respect prayer times, women need a headscarf, and go easy with the camera in the tomb area.

5. Yunus Emre Mosque and Tomb

A mosque in the Kirisci quarter with a tomb beside it. The claim is that Yunus Emre, the poet who did more than anyone to make Turkish a literary language, is buried here. Let us be straight, because the subject comes up elsewhere on this site.

More than ten places claim his grave. Karaman claims it. So does the village of Yunusemre in Eskisehir's Mihaliccik district, a pin in our own Eskisehir guide, where we wrote the same thing: none is settled. The primary sources are hagiographies and the poems themselves, and what is known about him as a historical person is thin and in places self-contradicting. You cannot fix a grave to a spot on that.

Karaman's version is not weak on paper. The poet lived in this region and wrote in the Turkish of the Karamanid period. But "he is buried right here" is a different sentence, and nothing supports it.

Do not come for the architecture. The building is plain. Come if you have a personal connection to the poet; without one, this stop gives you nothing.

6. Binbirkilise (Madensehri)

About thirty kilometres north of town, on the northern slope of Kara Dag, is the village of Madensehri. The church ruins are in the village. A wall faces somebody's garden, an apse stands next to a tractor, cut blocks have been recycled into the footings of a barn. This is not a fenced site next to a village. It is the village.

The name misleads. Binbirkilise means "a thousand and one churches" and it is an exaggeration: the Turkish and English Wikipedia entries both put the number of Byzantine church ruins in the area at around fifty. "Binbir" is a Turkish idiom for "a great many"; it was never a count. Nor are the ruins concentrated in one spot. They spread around Madensehri, Uckuyu and Degle. The pin marks Madensehri, where the density is highest.

Manage your expectations. There is no ticket office, no signage, no laid-out route. You wander on your own, through a working village, and some ruins are on private land. Greet people and ask before you climb on anything. The road is surfaced all the way.

7. Kara Dag summit and the Mahalac church

The mountain above Madensehri is an extinct volcano and there is a ruined church on its summit, called Mahalac. It is worth the trip for the position rather than the building. From the top you get the Karaman plain, the southern edge of the Konya plain, and on a clear day the Taurus range. It also becomes obvious why Byzantium put a church up here. This was not about seclusion. It was about being seen.

Now the hard part. The track to the summit is unsurfaced and not every vehicle will make it. It changes character after rain, and setting off in a low-clearance car is a bad idea. In winter there is snow. The distance looks short and the time is long, because your average speed will be low.

The decision is simple. High clearance and dry weather, go, it delivers. Otherwise settle for Madensehri, the real substance of the northern side of the province anyway. Whether the summit track is passable varies by season, so ask in the village or verify officially before you commit.

8. Taskale grain stores

This is the best thing in Karaman. Roughly forty-five kilometres east of the centre is the village of Taskale, and above it a steep rock face with hundreds of openings cut into it. From a distance the cliff looks perforated. Up close you see what they are: granaries.

The thing is, this is not a museum. A share of the stores are still in use. Villagers carry grain up, put it in the chamber, close the hatch. The rock is cool and dry, and rodents cannot climb to it. The system survives because it works, not because anyone preserved it. Turkey uses the phrase "living heritage" a great deal and it is usually empty. Here it is not.

There are stairs and platforms up to the stores, but the height is real and some passages are narrow. If heights bother you, look from below, which also works. Some chambers are private property, so do not open hatches.

The coordinate in our own source data had this place fifteen kilometres out. The corrected one is in the pin.

9. Manazan Caves

About four kilometres west of Taskale, in the valley wall right by the road. A settlement carved into the rock in layers: something on the bottom floor, something else above it, another thing above that. From outside it reads as an apartment block sunk into a cliff, and that comparison is not a stretch. It really was built on the logic of storeys.

It is generally taken to be a Byzantine refuge and living space. Passages were cut between the floors and some are close to vertical. Be honest with yourself here: this is not a managed cave visit. No railings in most places, no lighting, and the floor is slippery in patches. Getting to the upper floors counts as climbing.

Looking at it from below and from across the road is a legitimate option and enough to understand how the thing works. Do not push it. None of the floors here is worth a fall.

Manazan and Taskale are on the same route, so do them in one trip. Verify access officially, since arrangements at rock-cut sites change.

10. Incesu Cave

South of Taskale, about forty kilometres from the centre. Stalactites, stalagmites, columns, travertine pools. It is the best-known natural cave in the province, and unlike Manazan it was not carved by anyone. It is a karst void dissolved out by water.

Two warnings. The approach: after the road ends there is a short but steep climb, and the stone steps are slick when wet. The interior: damp, cold and slippery underfoot. Choose your shoes accordingly and bring a layer, because the inside feels cold when it is forty degrees outside.

On expectations, this is not Turkey's biggest cave and it is nothing like as developed as Dim or Damlatas. The payoff is precisely that it is undeveloped: no crowd, no queue. It fits into the same day as Taskale and Manazan and it is the sensible last stop on the eastern loop.

Whether the cave is open varies. Verify officially before you set out, because driving forty kilometres to a locked cave is a poor use of a morning.

11. Divle (Ucharman) village

A village in the Ayranci district. Its official name is Ucharman but everyone says Divle. You are not coming here for a view. You are coming for cheese.

Sheep's and goat's milk cheese is packed into specially prepared lamb and kid skins and lowered into the void outside the village. Turkish Wikipedia describes it as a cave the villagers call an obruk, 36 metres deep and 250 metres long, used as a natural cold store. Those figures come from that entry, which has an empty reference section, so treat them as its numbers rather than survey data.

The colour is the real story. After roughly five months down there, the skins turn red thanks to a bacterium living in the void. The rind is not spice or dye. It is the cave's own microbiology, and it is why very little in Turkey tastes like this. What comes out is sharp and salty.

The cheese is reported to be registered with the Turkish Patent and Trademark Office and to hold a geographical indication. Verify the type and date officially.

The obruk is outside the village and access depends on the season; the pin marks the village centre. Combine this with the Ayranci reservoir.

12. Ayranci Reservoir

Right beside the town of Ayranci. A body of water in the middle of the steppe, and in this region water means birds. Beyond sitting by it and looking, there is nothing organised to do. This is not a sight. It is a break.

Here is why it is in this guide at all. Eastern Karaman is dry and flat. Driving out towards Taskale and Divle you look at the same steppe for hours and your eyes tire of it. The Ayranci reservoir is where they rest. I am not dressing that up as a discovery.

For anyone interested in birds, the spring and autumn migration windows are more productive. Without optics you will still see something, but keep your expectations low.

The shoreline is barely developed and there is little shade. Standing here at midday in summer is not enjoyable, and the heat is serious. Come early or late in the day. Access to the dam structure may be restricted, so respect the signs.

13. Godet Reservoir

The nearest water to the centre, over towards Dereköy, about fifteen minutes by car. You will find pages online calling this area "Godet Canyon". I could not verify a location under that name from two independent sources, so the pin marks the reservoir.

And a reservoir is what you get. The mouth of a rocky valley has been dammed and the water has backed up behind it. The rock walls at the edge are good, but calling this a canyon is a marketing decision. For someone living in Karaman it is a weekend habit: a picnic, a short walk, some time by the water.

It makes sense if you have finished the town and have an afternoon spare. Do not travel from far away specifically for it. What sits east and north of the centre is well ahead of it.

The road is surfaced. There may be access restrictions in the dam area, and the water level swings hard with the season; a full lake in spring may have drawn well back by August.

14. Ermenek Great Mosque

Ermenek needs geography first. It is southwest of the centre, inside the Taurus range, a small town wedged onto the side of a valley. The straight-line distance is around seventy kilometres, but the road winds through mountains and the real driving time is far more. Doing Ermenek as a day trip means spending most of the day in the car.

Is it worth it? If you care about history, yes, because this was the first seat of the Karamanid beylik. Mehmed Bey, son of the beylik's founder, is generally held to have been born here. The place where everything in Karaman started is not the provincial capital. It is this town.

The Great Mosque dates to 1302, built by the Karamanid Mahmut Bey. It is plain: thick walls, timber elements, a mosque at the scale of a mountain town. Coming from Konya, or even central Karaman, it will feel small. But it is among the oldest surviving marks the beylik left, and where it stands matters. The beylik did not begin in a capital. It began in a mountain valley.

15. Tol Madrasa

A few hundred metres from the Great Mosque, dated 1339, also built by Mahmut Bey. It now operates as a museum, so this is the building in Ermenek you can actually go inside and walk around.

The name describes the fabric. "Tol" is used locally for a vault or arch, referring to the vaulted sections of the plan. The layout is conventional: courtyard, iwan, rooms around the edge. Put it next to the Hatuniye madrasa in central Karaman and the difference jumps out. Hatuniye is a capital-city building, showy, with money spent on marble carving. Tol Madrasa is provincial in scale, functional, restrained in its ornament.

That comparison is really a summary of forty years of the beylik's history. In 1339 in Ermenek you build like this. By 1382 in Karaman you build like that. In between, the power grew, the money arrived, and the ambition changed.

Because it is arranged as a museum, there are regional pieces on display inside. Half an hour is enough. Verify hours officially, since arrangements at small district museums are not always fixed.

16. Ermenek Castle (Firan Castle)

A ruined castle on the crag above the town, locally called Firan Kalesi. The ruin is modest: fragments of wall, traces of a few structures. You are not coming up here to see a castle. You are coming up here to be up here.

From the top you see what kind of place Ermenek was built on, and that view is the only way to understand the town. Down in the streets it is just a town with narrow lanes. From above you see the houses stepped up the slope, the valley squeezing in from both sides, buildings stacked on each other for lack of flat ground. It makes the beylik's move down to the plain look inevitable. There is no room here.

The climb is steep and the footing uneven. Not long, but not a stroll, and footwear matters. Not at midday in summer.

One note. The sources conflict on where the castle is. The Wikidata point falls in the town centre, the OpenStreetMap point on the crag, some four hundred and fifty metres apart. The pin follows OSM.

17. Ermenek Dam

About ten kilometres south of Ermenek, on the Goksu river. A concrete arch dam, and the figure is serious: according to Turkish Wikipedia the structure rises 210 metres above the river bed, which makes it one of the tallest dam bodies in Turkey. It began impounding water in 2009.

You come here for the engineering. The valley is already narrow and deep, the wall has been fitted into that narrowness, and looking down gives you the scale in a way a number cannot. The reservoir is long and winding because it follows the old course of the Goksu, so the water keeps appearing and disappearing along the road.

Expectations again: this is not a developed visitor site. No viewing terrace, no cafe, no organised car park. Access to the wall and the area around it may be restricted. It is an energy facility, so follow the signs and stay out of restricted zones.

If you have come as far as Ermenek, add it, and the drive itself is good. But do not set out from central Karaman for this alone.

How many days

Two days is what Karaman is worth, and for most visitors that is the right answer.

Day one is the centre and the north. Castle, Hatuniye, museum, Aktekke, the Yunus Emre mosque, all within walking distance and all done by lunch. In the afternoon drive up to Madensehri. If your vehicle is up to it, add the Kara Dag summit; if not, the village is enough.

Day two is the east, and do not compress it. The Taskale granaries, Manazan, the Incesu cave. The road is long, the distances mislead, and although the three sit on one line there are real kilometres between them. Leave early.

With a third day, take Ermenek, but stay overnight there. The Great Mosque, Tol Madrasa, the castle and the dam fit into one day; squeezing the drive in and out of the same day means you will mostly just drive.

A fourth day adds the Ayranci side, Divle and the reservoir. That is the province's last priority and unnecessary for most travellers.

With one day, do the centre and Taskale. Leave the north and Ermenek for another trip.

Getting there

Come by car. You cannot reach most of the points in this guide on public transport. For Madensehri, Kara Dag, Manazan, Incesu and Divle the bus option either does not exist or leaves you standing on a road several kilometres short.

Central Karaman has a rail connection and the station is in use, and coming via Konya is the usual approach. Verify timetables and which services actually run from the official source, since this changes. The town has no airport of its own; the nearest option is Konya, roughly a hundred kilometres away by road.

Ermenek deserves its own warning. It looks close in a straight line, but the road loops through the Taurus range and the real time is far above what a map suggests. In winter, snow and ice on that route are a genuine problem, and winter tyres in season are not a formality.

Then there is the surface question. The final stretches to the Kara Dag summit and to some village connections are unsurfaced and change after rain. Before taking a low-clearance car onto them, ask someone local.

When to go

Spring and autumn. April, May, September and October let you take both the town and the countryside comfortably. The steppe is green in spring, briefly but genuinely.

Summer is hard. Karaman sits at the southern edge of the central Anatolian steppe and in July and August the heat is serious with very little shade. The rock face at Taskale bakes in the midday sun, climbing to the castle at Ermenek at noon is not a sensible plan, and there is no shade at Ayranci. Start early and spend the middle of the day indoors. The caves have an advantage here.

Winter is hard for access rather than cold. The Kara Dag track is under snow, the Ermenek route ices up, and arrangements at the caves may change. If you come in winter, stick to the centre.

Shortest answer: April and May for the colour of the steppe, October for the weather. Crowds are not a problem in Karaman in any month.

What to eat

Divle obruk cheese is the province's signature. Sheep's and goat's milk, matured for months in a karst void, rust-rinded and sharp. It is not a taste everyone likes and I will say so in advance: salty, strong, and it has a smell. But there is very little like it in Turkey. Taste before you buy in the bazaar.

Dried okra is Karaman's most widespread piece of agriculture. You will see the tiny pods threaded on strings in the market. It goes into okra soup or is cooked with meat, and dried okra is a different thing from fresh: not slimy, but concentrated.

Apples are the province's biggest crop. Karaman is among Turkey's leading apple producers and in autumn there are roadside sales.

The rest follows central Anatolia generally: meat dishes, pastry, bulgur. I am naming no restaurants; in the bazaar, the place where the shopkeepers eat is usually the right one.

FAQ

**How many days do I need in Karaman?**

Two is the right answer for most visitors. Day one the centre and Madensehri, day two Taskale, Manazan and Incesu. With three days add Ermenek, but sleep there; done as a day trip you will spend most of it driving. A fourth day adds the Ayranci side and that is unnecessary for most people. With one day, do the centre plus Taskale. The centre only takes half a day, and what Karaman is actually worth is not in the centre anyway.

**Is Yunus Emre really buried in Karaman?**

Nobody knows, and treat anyone who gives you a firm answer with suspicion. More than ten places claim his grave: Karaman, the village of Yunusemre in Eskisehir's Mihaliccik district, Aksaray and others. The root of the problem is that what is documented about Yunus Emre as a historical figure is thin and in places contradicts itself, and the primary sources are hagiographies and the poems. Under those conditions you cannot anchor the grave to a location with evidence. Karaman's connection to the poet is real, but there is nothing that supports "the grave is exactly here". We wrote the same thing in our own Eskisehir guide.

**Was Karamanoglu Mehmed Bey's Turkish-language decree issued in Karaman?**

No, in Konya. This is the most common confusion. Sources place the decree on 13 May 1277 in Konya, which the Karamanids had taken at the time. Mehmed Bey is generally held to have been born in Ermenek, so the beylik's roots are inside Karaman province, but the decree was proclaimed outside its borders.

There is also a question about the text. The famous sentence, that from this day forward no language other than Turkish shall be used in the council, the lodge, the court, the assembly or the public square, is very widely repeated, but it is not certain that this wording comes verbatim from an original document. The event is recorded in period chronicles; the exact words took their known shape through later transmission. The decision is a historical event. The sentence as everyone knows it is a retelling.

**Are there really a thousand and one churches at Binbirkilise?**

No. The name is an exaggeration and comes from the Turkish idiom "binbir", meaning a great many rather than a literal count. The Turkish and English Wikipedia entries both give the number of Byzantine church ruins in the area as around fifty. Nor are they gathered in one archaeological park: they are scattered around Madensehri, Uckuyu and Degle, with some mixed in among village houses. Know this before you go. There is no gated site here. There is a village.

**Can I visit Karaman without a car?**

The centre yes, the province no. The five stops in town are within walking distance and take half a day. But the rest of this guide, meaning the part of Karaman that justifies the trip, needs a vehicle. Public transport to Madensehri, Kara Dag, Taskale, Manazan, Incesu and Divle is not realistic. Buses reach the district towns, but the places you want are not in the district towns. If you will not drive, spread the centre over a day and look for a local arrangement for the eastern loop.