Adana

The mound of Tepebağ in the middle of Adana has been settled for thousands of years, and the plain around it — Cilicia to the Greeks, the Çukurova today — was one of the crossing places of the ancient world, controlling the road from Anatolia to Syria through the Cilician Gates. Hittites, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks and Romans all passed through; under Rome the city stood on the highway east, and the stone bridge over the Seyhan was built to carry it.

After the Arab and Byzantine centuries and the Armenian kingdom of Cilicia, the Turkish Ramazanoğlu dynasty made Adana its capital in the 14th century and built the Great Mosque, the madrasa and the stone hall that still stand near the river; the Ottomans absorbed the emirate in the 16th century. For a long period the city was a malarial market town on a marshy plain, its population swelling and shrinking with the seasons of the nomads who wintered there.

Cotton changed that. From the middle of the 19th century, and especially when the American Civil War cut supplies to European mills, the Çukurova was planted with cotton, and Adana grew rich on ginning, trade and the railway. The prosperity was uneven and the late Ottoman decades violent: massacres in 1909 killed thousands of the city's Armenian inhabitants. French forces occupied Adana after the First World War and withdrew in January 1922, a date still marked locally. Irrigation from the Seyhan dam in the 1950s and industry since have made it one of Turkey's largest cities.

Adana has a strong regional character and enjoys it. Its people are known nationally for blunt speech, quick humour and an appetite for argument and food; the city's heat is a running joke and a point of pride. The Çukurova itself is a literary landscape, above all through the novels of Yaşar Kemal, whose stories of landless labourers, bandits and cotton bosses on this plain are among the best-known in modern Turkish writing.

Music and film matter here. Folk songs of the Çukurova and the bozlak tradition of the plains are still sung, and the Golden Boll film festival each autumn fills the cinemas and squares. Spring brings the Orange Blossom Carnival, a costumed parade through the centre that is unusual in Turkey and draws crowds from across the region.

The city is mixed. Alongside Turkish families long settled on the plain are Yörük descendants from the Taurus, Kurdish and Arabic-speaking communities, people from Hatay, and since 2011 a substantial Syrian population. Social life happens outdoors and late: tea gardens by the river, kebab houses, and long evenings on balconies once the heat drops. Hospitality is emphatic, and the kebab breakfast, with liver and şalgam before work, is a genuine local custom rather than a tourist story.

About 1.8 million people live in the four districts that make up the built-up area on both banks of the Seyhan — Seyhan, Çukurova, Yüreğir and Sarıçam — and more again in the rest of the province. It is one of Turkey's largest cities, and one where the gap between the newer western districts and the older eastern ones is plain to see.

The economy grows out of the plain. The Çukurova is among the most productive farmland in the country, yielding cotton, wheat, maize, citrus and soya under heavy irrigation from the Seyhan and Ceyhan rivers, and the city processes what it grows: textile mills, ginning plants, food factories, plastics and cement. Trade and transport matter too, with the motorway, the railway and the port of Mersin nearby, and a large air base stands at İncirlik on the eastern edge of the city.

Daily rhythms are set by the heat. Work and shopping start early, the middle of the day empties the streets in summer, and life resumes after dark, when parks, riverbanks and pavements fill. Water use, air quality, the cost of housing and the strain on services from population growth are recurring local issues, and the 2023 earthquakes, though centred further north, damaged buildings in the province and brought many displaced families into the city.

Adana's name travels on a skewer. Adana kebabı is hand-minced lamb with tail fat, seasoned with red pepper, pressed along a wide flat skewer and grilled over charcoal; it arrives with flatbread that has soaked up the fat, grilled long peppers and tomatoes, sumac-dressed onion and parsley, and a glass of şalgam, the cold sour juice of fermented purple carrot and turnip. Ordering it "hot" means more pepper, not more heat from the grill.

Beyond the kebab, the city's repertoire is broad and unapologetically meaty. Ciğer kebabı, skewered lamb liver, is eaten at breakfast with onions and herbs. Şırdan, stuffed sheep's stomach, is a street speciality; analı kızlı is a soup of bulgur dumplings, large and small, in a tomato and chickpea broth; and yüzük çorbası, made with tiny ring-shaped bulgur pieces, is a local staple. Bulgur stands in for rice in many dishes, and the dried red peppers of the plain flavour almost everything.

Sweets and summer drinks are their own subject. Bici bici, shaved ice over a set starch pudding with rose syrup and icing sugar, is sold on hot afternoons; halka tatlısı, a fried ring in syrup, and taş kadayıf are common, and the citrus groves around the city supply oranges, mandarins and lemons that appear as juice, jam and the blossom that scents the air each spring.