The Kilgen River, a tributary of the Ceyhan, flows through Kozan and crosses the plain south into the Mediterranean.

Kozan (Ottoman Turkish: قوزان, romanized: qōzān) was originally the name of the administrative division the town Sis was a part of.

[5] In 1266 Sis, the capital of the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia, was captured and damaged by the Egyptian Mamluks led by Baibars.

al-Said Barakah sent Qalawun to attack the city in 1277, but in 1375, Sis was taken and demolished by the Ramadanids, under the flag of the Mamluke Sultan of Egypt.

Sis had an important place in ecclesiastical history both the Armenian Apostolic Church and as a Roman Catholic titular see.

Even prior to the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia, Sis was an episcopal see and several names of bishops and patriarchs can be found in the literature: In 1441, Sis having fallen from its high estate, the Armenian clergy proposed to remove the see, and on the refusal of the Catholicos of the day, Gregory IX, installed a rival, namely Kirakos I Virapetsi (Kirakos of Armenia) at Echmiadzin, who, as soon as Selim I had conquered Greater Armenia[citation needed], became the more widely accepted of the two by the Armenian church in the Ottoman Empire.

[5] The Catholicos of Sis (of the Holy See of Cilicia) maintained himself nevertheless, with under his jurisdiction several bishops, numerous villages and convents, and was supported in his views by the Catholic Pope up to the middle of the 19th century,[citation needed] when the patriarch Nerses, declaring finally for Echmiadzin, carried the government with him.

[citation needed] That Catholicos had the right to prepare the sacred myron (oil) and to preside over a synod, but was in fact not more than a metropolitan, and regarded by many Armenians as schismatic.

The lofty castle and the monastery and church built by Leo II, and containing the coronation chair of the kings of Cilician Armenia,[5] were still noteworthy up until the Armenian genocide.