Turhal

Turhal is a town and a district of Tokat Province in the Black Sea region of Turkey. It is 48 km in the west of Tokat Province. Turhal is situated on a fertile plain fragmented by the Yesil Irmak river. It has an elevation of approximately 530 m. The city is best known for its sugar beet processing plant established in 1934 as an important enterprise of the young Turkish Republic. The mayor is Yilmaz Bekler.

The first nucleus of Turhal appeared as an important fortress or fortification named Talaura on the way between today's Amasya and Tokat provinces. It is deducted from the tablets found in the region that Turhal had been inhabited as early as the third millennium BC and had relations as far as the Mesopotamian cultures such as Sumerians who had already invented an effective alphabet. The Persian invasion in Anatolia during the 6th century BC made this region an important center influenced by the cult of Zoroastrianism.

The famous geographer of the antiquity, Strabo has, on ious occasions, drawn up different accounts on the region describing Turhal as a fortress in the north of another ancient city named Gayyura. In the 3rd century BCE, the region was occupied by the contingents of Alexander the Great's Macedonian army, but many insurrections had also taken place in this era as the Macedonian occupiers couldn't build up a total control on the region.