Mardin

The rock above the plain has been fortified since antiquity, when the castle guarded the frontier between Rome and Persia and the surrounding hills, known as Tur Abdin, filled with monasteries. Syriac Christianity took deep root here from the 4th century, and the monastery of Mor Hananyo outside the town became a seat of the Syriac Orthodox patriarchate, a position it held for centuries.

Mardin's built character comes from the Artuqids, a Turkmen dynasty that ruled from the town between the 12th and 15th centuries and gave it the Great Mosque, madrasas, baths and the terraced plan that still defines it. Their masons worked the soft local limestone into the carved doorways, arcades and lattices that run through the town. Mongol and Turkmen powers followed, and the Ottomans took Mardin in the 16th century, after which it settled into the role of a trading town on the caravan routes between Diyarbakır, Aleppo and Mosul, its merchants Muslim, Christian and Jewish.

The 20th century emptied much of that mixture. The First World War brought the massacre and deportation of Armenians and of large numbers of Syriac Christians across the province, an episode Syriacs call Sayfo; later decades brought emigration to Istanbul and to Europe, especially Sweden and Germany, and the PKK conflict from the 1980s further drained the countryside. The town itself was spared major destruction, and its stone fabric survived almost intact. Since the 2000s restoration, a new university and the arrival of domestic tourism have revived the old streets, and a small number of Syriac families have returned from the diaspora.

Mardin presents itself as a town of many tongues, and with reason: Arabic has long been the everyday language of many old Mardin families, Kurdish is spoken widely across the province, Turkish is the language of administration and schooling, and Syriac survives in the liturgy of the churches and in a few villages of the Tur Abdin. Calls to prayer and church bells are heard in the same streets, and the town's self-image rests on that coexistence.

The visible craft traditions are silver and copper work in the bazaar and olive-oil soap. Stone carving is the old trade of the town itself, and restoration work has kept a number of masons employed. Syriac families have historically made wine in the villages of the plateau, a rarity in the region.

Social life is formal and hospitable. Visitors are offered coffee — bitter mırra poured in small measures, or milky menengiç made from terebinth berries — and guests are expected to accept at least a little. Extended families remain strong, weddings are large and public, and in summer much of life moves onto roof terraces after dark. Domestic visitors are now a familiar presence in the old streets, particularly at weekends and in spring.

About 130,000 people live in the town and its immediate district, and roughly 870,000 in the province. The historic terraces hold only a fraction of them; most of the population is in Yenişehir on the plain below, a modern grid of flats built since the 1980s, or in the towns of the plain such as Kızıltepe. Mardin Artuklu University, founded in 2007, has added several thousand students and a younger tone to the new districts.

The provincial economy rests on agriculture on the irrigated plain — cotton, wheat, lentils and pistachios — on trade with the border, on public employment and increasingly on tourism, which fills the old town's hotels, restaurants and craft shops at weekends and in spring. Incomes are below the national average, and the Syriac population of the province has fallen to a few thousand as families have left for Europe and Istanbul since the 1980s.

Daily rhythms divide between the two towns. The old streets wake early with deliveries by handcart and donkey, because vehicles cannot reach many doors, and empty in the hottest hours; in the cool of the evening the terraces and tea gardens fill. Yenişehir runs on a more ordinary Turkish schedule of offices, schools and shopping centres. Water supply, parking and the pressures of restoration on a fragile stone town are recurring local concerns.

Mardin's cooking belongs to Upper Mesopotamia rather than to Anatolia, and its flavours lean on lamb, bulgur, almonds, pistachios and warm spices. The dish of honour is kaburga dolması, a rack of lamb ribs stuffed with spiced rice and almonds and roasted slowly until the meat falls from the bone, served on a tray for a table of guests. Dobo, lamb slow-cooked with garlic, is a related celebration dish.

Everyday food is bulgur-based. İçli köfte, thin shells of bulgur filled with minced meat, onion and walnuts, are boiled or fried; sembusek are small baked meat pastries sold from bakeries; firikli pilav uses green roasted wheat, smoky and chewy, in place of rice. Stuffed vegetables, lentil soups and flatbreads baked in a tandır fill out the table, and pomegranate syrup and sumac give many dishes their sourness.

Sweets and drinks carry the town's reputation. Almond sugar sweets, walnut pastries and syrup-soaked kadayıf are sold in the bazaar alongside olive-oil soap and spices. The drinks are distinctive: mırra, an intensely bitter coffee boiled several times and served in small handleless cups; menengiç, made from ground terebinth berries and milk; and, uniquely for the region, wine made by Syriac communities in the villages of the Tur Abdin, whose vineyards were famous in antiquity.