Helvadere is a town (''

belde Belde (literally "town", also known as ''kasaba'') means "large village with a municipality" in Turkish. All Turkish province centers and district centers have municipalities, but the villages (and also subdistricts) are usually too small to have ...

'') and municipality in the

Aksaray District Aksaray District (also: ''Merkez'', meaning "central") is a Districts of Turkey, district of Aksaray Province of Turkey. Its seat is the city Aksaray.Aksaray Province Aksaray Province ( tr, ) is a province in central Turkey. Its adjacent provinces are Konya along the west and south, Niğde to the southeast, Nevşehir to the east, and Kırşehir to the north. It covers an area of . The provincial capital is t ...

Turkey Turkey ( tr, Türkiye ), officially the Republic of Türkiye ( tr, Türkiye Cumhuriyeti, links=no ), is a transcontinental country located mainly on the Anatolian Peninsula in Western Asia, with a small portion on the Balkan Peninsula in ...

. Its population is 2,564 (2021).

Geography

Helvadere is on the western slopes of

Mount Hasan Mount Hasan ( tr, Hasan Dağı) is a volcano in Anatolia, Turkey. It has two summits, the high eastern Small Hasan Dagi and the high Big Hasan Dagi, and rises about above the surrounding terrain. It consists of various volcanic deposits, includ ...

at about . It is south of

Aksaray Aksaray (, Koine Greek: Ἀρχελαΐς ''Arhelays'', Medieval Greek: Κολώνεια ''Koloneya'', Ancient Greek: Γαρσάουρα ''Garsaura'') is a city in the Central Anatolia region of Turkey and the capital of Aksaray Province. In 202 ...

History

Helvadere is situated next to ruins of the ancient town Nora, which was an important town in

Hellenistic In Classical antiquity, the Hellenistic period covers the time in Mediterranean history after Classical Greece, between the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and the emergence of the Roman Empire, as signified by the Battle of Actium in ...

Capadocia Cappadocia or Capadocia (; tr, Kapadokya), is a historical region in Central Anatolia, Turkey. It largely is in the provinces Nevşehir, Kayseri, Aksaray, Kırşehir, Sivas and Niğde. According to Herodotus, in the time of the Ionian Revo ...

. Eventually, the town lost its former importance and in the Middle Ages it was a small village named Hardaldere.

Evliya Çelebi Derviş Mehmed Zillî (25 March 1611 – 1682), known as Evliya Çelebi ( ota, اوليا چلبى), was an Ottoman explorer who travelled through the territory of the Ottoman Empire and neighboring lands over a period of forty years, recording ...

in his Seyahatname describes hardaldere as a village of 65 houses; the majority of the population being Turk, but also with a

Greek Greek may refer to: Greece Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group. *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family. **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...

minority. In the early 20th century, the name was Halvadara. But in 1968 Halvadara was declared a town named Helvadere.

Economy

Helvadere is a typical agricultural town. Potato, apple and cherry are among the more important crops. Some members of the town work in western Europe as industrial workers (''gastarbeiter'') and they also contribute to the town's economy.

References

Populated places in Aksaray District Towns in Turkey {{Aksaray-geo-stub