Gürün

The current name Gürün is most probably the corruption of the ancient name Tegarama, a city in Anatolia during the Bronze Age.

The city was inhabited during the Old Assyrian Kingdom and Hittite Empire. Ancient rock caves dating to 2000 BC are located in the district. The caves would have been in use, possibly as a kind of apartment complex, during the Hittite period. The caves were also "used as a cold storage area, woodshed and animal feed storage area by local people until a short time ago", and are now open to visitors.[3] Nami Çiftçi, the town's mayor, told Daily Sabah that they "don't have a precise date determined by expert engineers or by people who are well-versed in this field, so I invite our historians to Gürün. Come, bring your knowledge and your tools, study these caves so that we can have the data regarding their age, and we can announce it to the world".[4]

During the Armenian Genocide, a sizable portion of the city's Armenian population was deported and killed. According to the memoir Goodbye, Antoura, during the pre-genocide years the Armenian population had achieved a level of stability in Gurun, with at least one Armenian family owning large swathes of land and orchards. In 1915, the Ottoman government appropriated these lands, and the Armenian population was deported southward and westward into the Syrian desert, eventually reaching the cities of Homs and Hama.[5]