The city, a mere apanage of the temple, was governed directly by the chief priest, who was always a member of the reigning Cappadocian family, and took rank next to the king.

The number of persons engaged in the service of the temple, even in Strabo's time, was upwards of 6,000, and among these, to judge by the names common on local tomb-stones, were many Persians.

Here Orestes deposited the hair that he cut from his head to commemorate the end of his sufferings (ἡ πένθιμος κόμη), and hence, according to a folk etymology of the Greeks, came the name of the place, Comana.

The site lies at Şarköy or Şar (once usually transcribed Shahr), a village in the Anti-Taurus on the upper course of the Sarus (Sihun), mainly Armenian, but surrounded by later settlements of Avshar Turkomans and Circassians.

The extant remains at Şar include a theatre on the left bank of the river, a fine Roman doorway and many inscriptions; but the exact site of the great temple has not been satisfactorily identified.

Bishop Heraclius appeared at the Council of Chalcedon in 451: Comana was then a suffragan of Melitene, the metropolis of Armenia Secunda; since then it figures as such in most of the Notitiae episcopatuum to the twelfth century.

The ruins of Comana are visible ten miles north-west of Guksun (Cocussus), in the Ottoman vilayet of Adana (Lequien, I, 447; William Mitchell Ramsay, The Historical Geography of Asia Minor).