Batman

i.The Tigris Basin and the Oil City

Batman is the youngest province in the Southeastern Anatolia GAP region, constituted by decree only on 16 May 1990. The province sits at the heart of the upper Tigris basin, between the Batman Çayı and Garzan Çayı tributaries that flow into the Tigris from the north. To the south rises the Raman Dağı (Raman Mountain), the modest range on whose southern slopes Turkey's first commercial petroleum was discovered in 1940 and brought into production in 1948 at the Raman-1 well. The city of Batman, in turn, grew up around the petroleum industry: until the early 1940s the site of modern Batman city was a small village called İluh, on the slopes of a tell at the edge of the Tigris plain; with the development of the Raman oilfield, the rapid construction of the Batman Refinery (1955, by TPAO, the Turkish Petroleum Corporation), and the associated industrial and residential development, the small village transformed within a decade into a substantial industrial city.

The city formally took the name Batman in 1950, restoring an older historical name attested in medieval sources for the broader country between the Batman and Garzan rivers. The modern province covers approximately 4,659 km² and has a population of about 635,000 (2022 census), making Batman a small-to-moderate province by Turkish standards but the most rapidly-developed urban centre in the upper Tigris basin.

Türkiye's first oil city — and home to Hasankeyf, the 12,000-year-old continuously inhabited fortress on the Tigris whose lower city was submerged in 2020 by the Ilısu Dam.

ii.The Etymology and the Medieval Sources

The name Batman is first attested in the late-13th- and 14th-century Arabic chronicles of the Artuqid principality of Hasankeyf — particularly in the Vakai-name-i Hısnkeyfa (the "Chronicle of Hasankeyf," preserved in manuscript at the Austrian National Library in Vienna) and in Ebubekir Tihranî's Diyarbekriyye. The medieval texts describe "Batman" variously as a village, a small principality, or a region of the upper Tigris basin. The famous Artuqid stone bridge over the Batman Çayı is consistently called the Pıra Batmanê ("Bridge of Batman") in the local Kurdish tradition. Ottoman 16th-century records (the 1540 Bitlis Vilayeti Tımar İcmal Defteri) describe Batman as a settlement attached to the Beşiri kaza; the famous Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi mentions the Batman bridge in his 1647 visit to the broader region.

The modern revival of the medieval name in 1950 — replacing the early-20th-century village name İluh — was a deliberate choice by the new TPAO refinery administration, drawing on the historical etymology of the surrounding country. The folk etymology that connects "Batman" to the Turkish verb batmak ("to sink") has no historical basis.

iii.The Hallan Çemi Excavations and the Deep Prehistory

The Batman country has been continuously inhabited since at least the late Pleistocene. The most important documented prehistoric site is Hallan Çemi Höyüğü, on the Batman Çayı near the village of Kaletepe in the Kozluk district, where excavations conducted by the American archaeologist Prof. Michael Rosenberg between 1991 and 1994 recovered substantial quantities of Neolithic-period material dated to approximately 10,200–9,200 BCE. The Hallan Çemi excavations are among the most important Neolithic finds anywhere in southeastern Anatolia and have contributed substantially to the broader understanding of the early Neolithic transition in the region. The Hallan Çemi finds — now in the Diyarbakır Museum — include early evidence of the domestication of pigs, distinct from the broader sheep-and-goat domestication patterns of the wider Near East.

The wider Bronze and Iron Age archaeology of the Batman country is substantial but unevenly excavated. The upper Tigris basin sat within the cultural sphere of the Mitanni state in the second millennium BCE, and within the broader Assyrian frontier through the first millennium BCE. The Hasankeyf area — discussed at length below — preserves continuous occupation evidence from the Late Pleistocene through the modern period.

iv.Hasankeyf — The Great Tigris Fortress

The single most important historical and cultural site in Batman province is Hasankeyf — the ancient and medieval Tigris-cliff city, transferred from Mardin province to the new Batman province by the 1990 administrative decree. Hasankeyf is one of the oldest continuously inhabited sites in the world, with occupation evidence going back approximately 12,000 years. The site combines an upper city built on a sheer rocky promontory above the Tigris, an extensive complex of rock-cut cave dwellings and chapels (estimated at 4,000+ cavities cut into the soft limestone of the cliff face, used continuously from prehistory through the late medieval period), and a lower city on the Tigris floodplain at the foot of the promontory.

The medieval Hasankeyf was the capital of the Hasankeyf Artuqid principality (a branch of the broader Artuqid dynasty, ruling Hasankeyf from approximately 1101 to 1232), under whom the city reached its greatest extent. The most famous surviving monuments of the Artuqid period — much of which is preserved on the cliff above the river, above the 2020 reservoir level — include:

The Old Tigris Bridge (Eski Dicle Köprüsü) — built around 1116 CE by the Artuqid sultan Fahreddin Karaarslan, originally with a central wooden span on stone piers that allowed boat passage beneath. Three of the original five massive stone piers still stand in the river (the central wooden span was destroyed in the 17th century). The bridge was, at the time of its construction, among the largest medieval bridges in the world.

The Citadel on the cliff — successive Roman, Byzantine, Artuqid, Ayyubid, and Ottoman fortifications crowning the rocky promontory above the Tigris. The cliff itself, with the rock-cut chambers and tunnels, remains substantially intact.

The Zeynel Bey Türbesi — a unique 15th-century Aq Qoyunlu mausoleum (the only Aq Qoyunlu princely tomb in this style) with its distinctive blue-glazed tile cylindrical drum. To save the tomb from the Ilısu Dam reservoir, it was relocated in May 2017 via specialised hydraulic transport to a new site in the upper Hasankeyf, where it now stands.

The construction of the Ilısu Dam — part of the broader Southeast Anatolia Project (GAP) — was completed and the reservoir began filling in 2020, submerging the lower Hasankeyf city, the medieval bridge piers, and substantial portions of the rock-cut cave complexes below the high-water mark. The upper city, the citadel, the Zeynel Bey tomb, and the principal Artuqid mosques and madrasas were preserved either in situ at higher elevations or transferred to the new Yeni Hasankeyf (New Hasankeyf) settlement built upstream on the Tigris. The Hasankeyf submersion was the subject of substantial international protest before and during its execution; the cultural-heritage loss is reckoned among the most significant of any single 21st-century infrastructure project anywhere in the world.

v.The Long Medieval Centuries

The wider Batman country passed through the standard succession of upper-Mesopotamian medieval administrations: the Marwanid Kurdish dynasty (centred at Mayyafariqin/Silvan, c. 990–1085 — see the Diyarbakır essay); the Great Seljuks; the Hasankeyf Artuqids (1101–1232); the Ayyubids (briefly, after Saladin); the Mongol Ilkhanids; the Aq Qoyunlu; and finally the Ottoman state from the early 16th century under Selim I "the Stern". Under the Ottomans, the region was administered as a kaza of the broader Diyarbekir Eyalet, with the locally-influential Hasankeyf Beyliği (a small semi-autonomous Kurdish principality) holding effective local administration through much of the early modern period under the Ottoman Hükümet system.

vi.The Petroleum Discovery and the Modern City

The defining event in Batman's modern history was the discovery of commercial-quantity petroleum on the southern slopes of Raman Dağı. The first exploration well, Raman-1, was drilled in 1940 by the Mineral Research and Exploration Institute (MTA); commercial production began in 1948. The wider Raman field was the first commercial Turkish oilfield, and through the 1950s and 1960s remained the principal domestic source of Turkish petroleum (now substantially declined as production has matured, but still active). The associated infrastructure transformed the country: the Batman Refinery (TPAO/Tüpraş) was constructed in 1955; the Batman–Dörtyol pipeline (1967, linking the upper Tigris fields to the Mediterranean coast at İskenderun) carried the produced oil to export; the Haydarpaşa–Kurtalan railway reached Batman in 1944; Batman Airport opened in 1954.

The petroleum-driven development pulled rapid immigration into the city from surrounding districts and provinces, transforming the demographic and cultural character of the area. The city grew from approximately 1,000 inhabitants in 1947 (when Batman was constituted as a bucak / sub-district) to a substantial industrial centre by the time of the 1990 elevation to provincial status. The petroleum economy, while moderated since the 1980s, remains a defining feature of the provincial identity.

vii.The Republican Administrative Sequence

The administrative status of Batman developed in step with its industrial development: bucak (sub-district) 1947; ilçe (district) 1957, as part of Siirt province; finally elevated to il (province) on 16 May 1990 by Decree no. 3647. The 1990 decree also transferred the surrounding districts of Hasankeyf and Gercüş (from Mardin), and Beşiri, Kozluk, and Sason (from Siirt) to the new Batman province. The current province has six districts: Batman center, Beşiri, Gercüş, Hasankeyf, Kozluk, and Sason.

viii.The Modern Province and the Tigris Country

Modern Batman is a substantial regional city (the central district at approximately 400,000) within a province of approximately 635,000 (2022 census). The economy rests on the maturing petroleum and refinery industry, the agricultural country of the Beşiri and Batman plains (irrigated through the broader GAP infrastructure with increasing intensity), and the growing service and university sector (Batman University was founded in 2007 and has expanded substantially since). The province has been politically prominent through the modern Republican period, with the Kurdish-majority population making the city one of the principal centres of southeastern Anatolian political activity.

The surrounding country offers substantial natural and cultural attractions beyond Hasankeyf: the Sason and Garzan valleys (deep mountain country leading toward Bitlis and Lake Van); the Raman and Aydınlık mountain ranges with their dramatic rock formations and high pastoral country; the Beşiri plain with its archaeological mound landscape; and the major surrounding archaeological sites of Çattepe, Kerh, and the Sason valley castles.

ix.Visiting Batman Today

Batman is reached by air into Batman Airport (BAL) from Istanbul, Ankara, and İzmir, or by long-distance bus from Diyarbakır (an hour and a half), Mardin (three hours), or further afield. The province is connected by rail to Kurtalan and Diyarbakır through the historic Haydarpaşa–Kurtalan line.

A long weekend covers the principal destinations: a day in Batman city and the refinery-period industrial heritage (the Batman Petrol Müzesi opened in 2014 in the historic TPAO complex); a day at Hasankeyf (the upper city, the Zeynel Bey tomb, the new Yeni Hasankeyf settlement with the relocated medieval monuments, and the boat tours of the Ilısu reservoir that allow visitors to look down on the submerged lower city); a day in the Sason valley and the surrounding mountain country.

The Batman table is the southeastern Anatolian table of the upper Tigris country: perde pilavı (the festive chicken-and-rice pilaf in a pastry crust, particularly associated with the Mardin–Batman tradition), the famous Batman kazandibi, çiğ köfte in the southeastern style, the lamb and bulgur dishes of the surrounding villages, and the strong tea that anchors every meal. For the broader southeastern table, see Anatolian Tables; for recipes, our sister site TurkishCooking.com.