Diyarbakır

Diyarbakır sits on a basalt plateau above the Tigris River in Türkiye's southeast, its black-walled Old City one of the most atmospheric urban landscapes in the country. The city has been a crossroads of civilisations for millennia — Hurrian, Assyrian, Roman, Byzantine, Armenian, Seljuk, Ottoman — and its stones still carry that weight.

The Walls of Diyarbakır

The city's most defining feature is its continuous circuit of ancient walls, stretching roughly five kilometres and built on foundations laid by the Romans in the third century. Basalt blocks form a massive rampart punctuated by deep-gated entrances, each named after the trade or direction it served. You can walk the full perimeter, passing watchtowers restored by successive empires and looking down over the tiled rooftops and narrow lanes of the old quarter within. At certain points the walls reach ten metres or more in height, and the dark stone absorbs the afternoon heat in a way that makes the ramparts a different experience at dawn and dusk.

The Old City and its Mosques

Inside the walls, the street plan is medieval in its logic — a warren of lanes that once organised neighbourhoods by craft or faith. The Great Mosque of Diyarbakır, known as the Ulu Cami, dates to the Seljuk period with elements from later centuries layered into its fabric. Nearby, the Hz-i Süleyman Mosque occupies the site of a much earlier church, and fragments of Armenian architectural detail are embedded in walls throughout the quarter. Tea gardens occupy quiet courtyards where the noise of the surrounding streets drops away entirely.

Heartsürme and the Tigris

The city takes its name from the medieval fortress of Amid, once a powerful Armenian capital and the seat of a Catholicos. The historic Tigris promenade here — called the Hevsel Gardens — was historically a green belt between the city and the river, a space of orchards and water channels now protected as a cultural landscape. Strolling toward the river at the eastern edge of the old walls, you move from stone and shade into open ground where the Tigris runs wide and slow, its banks lined with tea houses and weekend crowds.

Food and the Market

Diyarbakır's cuisine reflects its location at the convergence of Anatolian, Kurdish and Mesopotamian traditions. The city's distinctive kebabs are seasoned with a saffron-based spice paste called mesir, and the local protein is lamb — grilled, stewed, or slow-cooked. The covered bazaar runs through several interconnected halls, selling spices, copperware, dried legumes and sesame sweets. On a weekday morning the market is unhurried, and the scent of freshly roasted coffee and dried lime drifts between the stalls.