Diyarbakır

i.The Walls and the Tigris

Diyarbakır occupies a basalt escarpment on the right bank of the upper Tigris, about a hundred metres above the river, at the eastern edge of the Southeastern Anatolian plain. The city sits in the northern part of the great Upper Mesopotamian plain that medieval Arab geographers called Al-Jazira — "the Island," for the country between the Tigris and the Euphrates. Through every period of its written history Diyarbakır has been defined by a single architectural feature: the great black basalt city walls, approximately 5.5 kilometres in circumference, encircling the historical old city in an almost complete ring. The walls are the second-longest continuous fortification of the ancient world after the Great Wall of China, the most complete medieval city walls anywhere in the eastern Mediterranean, and — in their present form — substantially the work of the Roman emperors of the mid-4th century CE, with successive Byzantine, Islamic, Seljuk, Artuqid, Aq Qoyunlu, and Ottoman additions and repairs.

Below the walls, on the river plain, the famous Hevsel Gardens (Hevsel Bahçeleri) extend along the Tigris for several kilometres — an agricultural and pastoral landscape continuously cultivated since the Neolithic, producing the famous Diyarbakır watermelon (which can grow to extraordinary sizes), vegetables, and fruit for the markets of the surrounding country. In 2015, UNESCO inscribed "Diyarbakır Fortress and Hevsel Gardens Cultural Landscape" on the World Heritage List, recognising the walls, the inner citadel, and the gardens together as a single integrated cultural landscape of outstanding universal value.

The black basalt city on the Tigris — six successive names across five millennia, walled almost continuously since the 4th century, and one of the most distinctive urban silhouettes anywhere in the eastern Mediterranean.

ii.Çayönü and the Birth of Agriculture

The deepest archaeological layer of the Diyarbakır region is one of the great moments of human prehistory. At Çayönü Tepesi — about sixty kilometres west of the city, near the modern town of Ergani — the German–Turkish excavations of Halet Çambel and Robert Braidwood from the 1960s revealed one of the oldest sustained agricultural village settlements anywhere in the world. Çayönü was occupied continuously from approximately 7,500 to 5,000 BCE, with later intermittent occupation. The site is among the earliest known places where wild wheat and lentils were brought under cultivation, and where sheep and goats were domesticated — the founding moments of the so-called "Neolithic Revolution" that transformed humanity from nomadic hunter-gatherers into settled agriculturalists. Çayönü's importance in the global story of human civilisation is comparable only to Jericho, Çatalhöyük, and Göbekli Tepe.

The Grikihaciyan Tepesi nearby preserves a later Chalcolithic settlement (early 5th millennium BCE) belonging to the Halaf Culture, with its characteristic round-plan domed houses and richly painted pottery — one of the great pottery traditions of the prehistoric Near East. The Paleolithic and Mesolithic caves at Hassuni (near Eğil-Silvan) and the Hilar caves on the Tigris near Ergani document the still deeper layers.

iii.Hurrian Foundations and the Iron Age Layers

The first fortified structure on the site of modern Diyarbakır was built around 3000 BCE, on the highest rise of the basalt plateau — the area now occupied by the İçkale (Inner Citadel) — by the Hurrians, the Indo-Iranian people who controlled much of northern Mesopotamia in the third millennium BCE. The site bore at this period the name that would persist in its first millennium form, Amida. Through the Bronze Age and early Iron Age the city passed in turn through the dominions of the Mitanni, the Assyrians (who maintained important presence at the surrounding sites of Eğil Castle and the Birkleyn caves near Lice, with their famous rock inscriptions), the Urartians, the Achaemenid Persians, Alexander the Great, the Seleucids, and the Parthians.

iv.Roman Amida and the 4th-Century Walls

The city became substantially what we know it as during the Roman period. As the eastern frontier between Rome and the Sasanian Persian empire ran along the upper Tigris and Euphrates, Amida grew into one of the great Roman frontier fortresses. The Roman emperor Constantius II (reigned 337–361 CE) is credited with the major rebuilding of the city walls in the mid-4th century, giving them substantially the form they hold today: built of the black basalt of the local quarries, faced with cut stone, punctuated by sixteen great rectangular towers with arrow-slits and chambers, and entered through four monumental gates — Harput Kapısı (the north gate), Mardin Kapısı (south), Urfa Kapısı (west), and Yeni Kapı (east).

The city's strategic importance made it a frequent target. In 359 CE, the Sasanian shah Shapur II besieged Amida for seventy-three days and finally took it; the historian Ammianus Marcellinus, who was present as a Roman officer inside the besieged city, has left in his Res Gestae one of the most vivid eyewitness accounts of any ancient siege. Roman armies recovered the city; the walls were rebuilt; the contest continued through the long Roman–Sasanian wars of the 5th, 6th, and early 7th centuries.

v.Byzantine Amida and the Coming of Islam (639)

From the formal division of the Roman empire in 395 CE, Amida became a frontier city of the eastern Roman (Byzantine) empire. The emperor Anastasius I (reigned 491–518) built the major fortified suburb of Dara twenty kilometres south of Amida, complementing the city's defences with one of the most heavily fortified Byzantine frontier outposts anywhere in the east. The Sasanian–Byzantine wars of the 6th century brought repeated sieges; the early 7th century brought Khosrow II's great campaigns and the brief Sasanian occupation that preceded the dramatic Byzantine recovery under Heraclius.

The world changed in the 7th century. After the rise of Islam and the lightning campaigns of the Rashidun caliphate, Amida was taken by Muslim forces in 639 CE, during the reign of the Caliph Umar, and was incorporated into the new Islamic state. The city became an Islamic urban centre; the new Arabic name Amid (from the Aramaic and Greek Amida) was preferred; the early Islamic period brought the Umayyad and then Abbasid administration.

vi.Islamic Amid: Marwanids, Seljuks, Artuqids

Between the 9th and 12th centuries the city passed through a remarkable succession of regional dynasties: the Hamdanids, the Buyids (Büveyhoğulları), and most importantly the Marwanids — the Kurdish dynasty that ruled the Diyarbakır region from approximately 990 to 1085 CE from their capital at the city of Mayyafariqin (modern Silvan, just east of Diyarbakır). The Marwanid period was a golden age for the wider region, with substantial building campaigns, the patronage of scholars and poets, and the consolidation of a distinctively Kurdish-Islamic regional culture.

The Marwanids were absorbed into the Great Seljuk empire under Sultan Malik-Shah in 1085. From the Great Seljuks, Amid passed to the local İnaloğulları (Inalids, 1093–1183) and then the Nisanoğulları (Nisanids). The single most consequential building of the Islamic period is the Ulu Camii (Great Mosque) of Diyarbakır, in the centre of the old city. Built originally in 1091 on the foundations of a Roman temple and the later Byzantine Mar Toma church, the Ulu Camii is among the oldest mosques in Anatolia and one of the four "great mosques" of the early Islamic world (alongside the Umayyad Mosque of Damascus, the Great Mosque of Mecca, and Al-Aqsa). Its courtyard, with its rich variety of reused Roman columns and capitals, is one of the most visually striking architectural ensembles in the city.

After the Seljuk decline came the Artuqids of Hasankeyf (1101–1232) and then the Artuqids of Mardin, who held Diyarbakır through much of the 12th and 13th centuries and substantially expanded the walls, towers, and inner-citadel structures. The Artuqid period left distinctive black-and-white stone reliefs (the famous Diyarbakır seljuki-style animal reliefs on the Ulu Beden tower of the walls, depicting paired lions, eagles, and bulls) that are among the great achievements of medieval Islamic sculpture.

vii.Aq Qoyunlu, Safavid, and Ottoman Diyarbekir

The fall of the Artuqids brought the city under successive Mongol, Ilkhanid, and then Aq Qoyunlu ("White Sheep" Turkmen) rule. The Aq Qoyunlu period, with Diyarbakır serving as one of the principal capitals of Uzun Hasan and his successors in the second half of the 15th century, was a particularly significant moment for the city — Aq Qoyunlu Diyarbakır was one of the great Persianate cultural centres of the eastern Mediterranean, with a flourishing court literature, miniature painting, and a notable manuscript-production tradition.

The Aq Qoyunlu state was destroyed by the rising Safavids of Iran in the early 16th century. Selim I "the Stern" (Yavuz Sultan Selim)'s great eastern campaign culminated in the Battle of Çaldıran (23 August 1514), and in the following year Diyarbakır was incorporated into the Ottoman empire as the centre of the new Diyarbekir Eyalet — one of the largest Ottoman provinces, covering southeastern Anatolia and extending into northern Mesopotamia. The Ottoman name Diyar-Bekr ("land of the Bakr [tribe]") referred to a tradition that the medieval Arab tribe of Banū Bakr had settled the Upper Mesopotamian country at the time of the early Islamic conquests. The Ottoman city continued the long urban tradition: the walls were repaired and extended; the great Ottoman mosques (the Behram Paşa Camii of 1572, the Melek Ahmed Paşa Camii of 1591, the Nasuh Paşa Camii) were built; the wider trading population of the city — Muslims, Armenians, Syriac Christians, Jews, and Chaldean Catholics — gave Ottoman Diyarbekir its distinctive multi-confessional character.

viii.Republican Diyarbakır and the 1937 Renaming

Under the Republic, Diyarbekir became the centre of the new Diyarbakır Vilayet. The city's name was formally Turkified from Ottoman Diyarbekir to Diyarbakır in 1937, the change being part of the broader Republican-era renaming campaign that adjusted the orthography of many Ottoman place names to the modern Turkish spelling. The 20th-century population of the city carried forward, in modified form, the long pre-modern multi-confessional character — though successive demographic transitions across the century (including the 1915 wartime relocation across the Ottoman southeast, the post-1923 Greek-Turkish population exchange that affected nearby Pontic regions, and the long internal migrations of the Republican period) substantially reshaped the population mix.

Modern Diyarbakır is the largest city of Southeastern Anatolia and one of the great Kurdish-cultural centres of the Republic. The province's population is approximately 1.8 million (2022 census), with the metropolitan city centre at around 1.1 million. The city has been the political and cultural focus of substantial conflict over the long Republican period, particularly during the active phase of the PKK insurgency from the 1980s through the early 2010s. The 2015–2016 urban warfare in the historic Sur quarter — the area inside the old walls — between Turkish security forces and PKK-aligned urban units caused major damage to the UNESCO-protected historical fabric; substantial reconstruction has followed under state and municipal programmes through the late 2010s and early 2020s.

ix.The Monuments — Walls, Ulu Camii, the Inner Citadel

The City Walls (Diyarbakır Surları) — 5.5 km in circumference, built of the local black basalt, with sixteen surviving great towers and four monumental gates. The walls are most spectacular at the Mardin Kapısı in the south and at the Ulu Beden tower with its 12th-century Artuqid animal reliefs. A complete walk around the walls (some 90 minutes at a steady pace) is among the great urban walks in Türkiye.

İçkale (the Inner Citadel) — the original Hurrian–Roman fortified high ground in the north-eastern corner of the old city, with the surviving Roman and Byzantine fortifications, the Saint George Church (Aziz Yorgi Kilisesi), the Artuqid palace ruins, and the Diyarbakır Archaeological Museum in the restored former Hazret-i Süleyman Camii complex.

Ulu Camii (1091) — one of the oldest mosques in Anatolia, on the site of an earlier Roman temple and Byzantine cathedral, with its great rectangular courtyard surrounded by Roman, Byzantine, and Islamic columns reused from earlier structures.

Hasan Paşa Han (1572) — the great Ottoman caravanserai, restored and now functioning as a cafés-and-restaurants complex at the centre of the old city.

Surp Giragos Armenian Church — the largest Armenian church in the Middle East, originally built in 1376 and rebuilt in 1883; closed in 1915, used as a cotton warehouse for decades, restored 2009–2011 in a joint state–Armenian community programme and reopened for liturgical use. Damaged during the 2015–16 Sur conflict; substantial repairs underway.

Mar Petyun (Saint Pethion) Chaldean Catholic Church and Meryem Ana (Virgin Mary) Syriac Orthodox Church — together preserve the long Christian heritage of Diyarbakır, both active today as small but continuing congregations.

Hevsel Gardens (Hevsel Bahçeleri) — the UNESCO-listed agricultural landscape along the Tigris below the walls, continuously cultivated since the Neolithic, producing the famous Diyarbakır watermelons (which historically reached spectacular sizes) and the city's distinctive vegetables and herbs.

x.Visiting Diyarbakır Today

Diyarbakır is reached by air into Diyarbakır Airport (DIY) from across Türkiye, by long-distance bus from the eastern, southeastern, and central provinces, or by the long-distance rail line from Ankara. The city centre is best navigated on foot, particularly the old quarter within the walls; the wider new city, which extends north and west of the old quarter, has a modest metro system serving the principal university and government districts.

Two days is reasonable: a full day in the old city (Ulu Camii, the Hasan Paşa Han, the Surp Giragos Church, the Chaldean and Syriac churches, the museum at İçkale, and a complete walk around the walls); a half-day in the Hevsel Gardens and the Tigris embankment; a half-day for the surrounding sites (Çayönü at Ergani, the Eğil Castle and rock inscriptions, the Marwanid capital at Silvan/Mayyafariqin). The wider province extends in important directions: south to Mardin (with its own UNESCO-tentative status), east to Hasankeyf (the ancient Cizre/Hasankeyf, partly submerged by the Ilısu Dam in 2020), and west to the Adıyaman Commagene country.

The Diyarbakır table is the southeastern Anatolian table at its richest: the great kebaps and grilled meats, meftune (a meat-and-eggplant stew), kibbeh (the small wheat-and-meat dumplings), kaburga dolması (stuffed ribs of lamb), the famous Diyarbakır karpuz (watermelon) at the height of the August harvest, and the meze table that draws on the broader Mesopotamian–Levantine culinary tradition. For the broader southeastern table, see Anatolian Tables; for recipes, our sister site TurkishCooking.com.