Cilicia
CILICIA
valley in southern turkey situated between the taurus mountains and the mediterranean sea, bordering syria.
Cilicia is an important agricultural region. Adana is its largest city, and Alexandretta and Mersin are its major ports. In the late nineteenth century, Cilicia's growing cotton industry attracted large numbers of Muslim refugees from the Balkans and Russia. Cilicia's centuries-old Armenian population, descended from the eleventh century Kingdom of Little Armenia in Cilicia, was largely exiled or killed in the revolts and wars of the early twentieth century. The French occupied Cilicia from 1918 to 1921, when it was incorporated by the Franklin–Bouillon Agreement into the Turkish Republic.
see also adana; alexandretta.
Bibliography
Shaw, Stanford, and Shaw, Ezel Kural. History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey. 2 vols. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976–1977.
Elizabeth Thompson