Hizan

Hizan was a Kurdish emirate in the steep valley of the Gindig Su, a tributary of the Botan. From perhaps the mid-thirteenth century, its walled town was an emir's seat, with caravanserais serving trade from Siirt that avoided the Bitlis pass.

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries its emirs rebuilt the fortifications, and Emir Dawud founded a medrese. Under Ottoman rule Hizan housed an imperial mint. Its Bekiran Kurdish clans lived beside a large Armenian peasant population until the upheavals of the nineteenth century.