Darende

Darende, known in older records as Taranda or Daranda, lies northwest of Malatya in a mountainous district along the Tohma valley. Routes through this rugged country connected central Anatolia with Malatya and lands farther southeast. The region's older remains include the Roman mausoleum at Ozan, while the long-established road through Darende linked it to a succession of Anatolian powers.

In the late fourteenth century the district lay in a contested borderland between the Ottomans and the Mamluk sphere. Bayezid I took Darende and neighbouring places in 1399, but after his defeat at Ankara in 1402 Timur gained control of the region. Darende came under Ottoman rule again in the early sixteenth century. The traveller Evliya Çelebi described its ruined fortress in the seventeenth century and noted Armenian and Turcoman inhabitants. Orchards and cultivated valleys supported local life alongside the routes passing through the mountains.