Diyarbakır

The basalt plateau above the Tigris has held a walled town for at least three thousand years. It appears in Assyrian records as Amid, and under Rome it became Amida, a frontier fortress rebuilt on a grand scale by Constantius II in the 4th century; the walls that still ring the old city grew from that Roman circuit, extended and repaired by Byzantine, Arab, Marwanid, Artuqid, Ottoman and later rulers, each leaving inscriptions and reliefs on the towers. The Sasanian capture of Amida in 359, after a long siege, was recorded in detail by the soldier and historian Ammianus Marcellinus.

Arab rule from the 7th century gave the city its present name, from the Bakr tribe that settled here, and the Great Mosque was founded soon afterwards and rebuilt in 1091–92 using columns and stone from earlier buildings. The Artuqids made Diyarbakır a capital and added bridges, palaces and madrasas, and the Ottomans took it in 1514, governing a large province from behind the walls. For centuries the population was mixed, with Armenian, Syriac and Chaldean Christian communities alongside Muslims, and the churches of the old city date from that period.

The 20th century transformed it. The Christian communities were destroyed or driven out during the First World War; the city then grew as a provincial centre, and from the 1980s it became the focus of the conflict between the Turkish state and the PKK, drawing hundreds of thousands of villagers displaced from the countryside. Fighting in the Sur district between November 2015 and May 2016 destroyed several neighbourhoods inside the walls, much of which was then demolished and redeveloped. In 2015 the fortress and the Hevsel Gardens were inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Diyarbakır is the cultural capital of Turkey's Kurds, and that shapes almost everything about public life. Kurdish is spoken widely alongside Turkish, the city's musicians and writers are known across the Kurdish-speaking world, and Nevruz on 21 March brings one of the largest crowds in the country to a field outside the city for bonfires, speeches and dancing. The dengbêj tradition of unaccompanied narrative singing has a dedicated house in the old city where older singers perform.

The city's identity is also built on its stone. Black basalt gives the walls, mosques, churches and courtyard houses a sombre uniformity, often banded with pale limestone, and the craft of cutting and laying it has been handed down locally. Inside the old houses, life turns inward to a shaded courtyard with a pool and an iwan open to the north, an arrangement designed for a place where summer heat is punishing.

Social manners are formal and hospitable, and family networks matter a great deal; guests are fed generously and repeatedly. The city carries a heavy political memory, and residents are used to visitors asking about it, but the subject is best left for hosts to raise. Alongside that, there is considerable civic pride in the walls, in the restored churches and hans, and in the food, which Diyarbakır considers a match for its better-known neighbours.

About 1.1 million people live in the built-up city and roughly 1.8 million in the province. It is young, with a birth rate well above the Turkish average, and it grew very quickly from the 1990s as families left the countryside during the conflict, producing crowded districts such as Bağlar and, more recently, the planned expansion of Kayapınar. Unemployment is high and incomes are among the lowest in the country.

The regional economy rests on agriculture in the Tigris basin — wheat, cotton, lentils, melons and livestock — on trade and transport, on public employment and on services for the surrounding provinces, including a large university and hospitals that draw patients from across the south-east. Small workshops in and around the old city still produce jewellery, copper and textiles.

Daily life bends around the summer. Work begins early, the middle of the day empties the streets from June to September, and the city reappears in the evening in the tea gardens along the walls and beside the river. Winter is short and grey. The rebuilding of the Sur district, housing costs, water supply and employment for the young are the recurring subjects of local conversation.

Diyarbakır's cooking is the food of the upper Tigris: lamb, bulgur, aubergine, garlic and sour flavourings. The city's own dish is ciğer kebabı, cubes of lamb liver wrapped in tail fat and grilled over charcoal, eaten with raw onion, parsley, hot pepper and thin bread — a breakfast in the markets and a late-night meal in the old city. Kaburga dolması, lamb ribs stuffed with spiced rice and almonds, is the celebration dish, and meftune, meat stewed with aubergine and garlic in sumac water, carries the sour note that runs through the local table.

Bulgur does the work that rice does elsewhere: in içli köfte, in pilavs and in soups thickened with pulses. Flatbreads are baked in tandır ovens, and cheeses pressed and matured in skins come from the surrounding pastures. Summer brings the melons the city is famous for, grown in the alluvial ground by the river and sold from carts and pavement stacks at the end of the season.

Breakfast is the meal visitors remember. Long tables are laid in the courtyards of the old caravanserais with cheeses, honey and clotted cream, olives, eggs cooked in butter, tomato and pepper stews, several breads and endless tea. The tea itself is drunk very strong and dark in small glasses; mırra, the bitter boiled coffee of the south-east, is served after heavy meals and at gatherings.