Diyarbakir

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Time to move on. From the Ataturk Dam we continued our journey to Diyarbakir. This part of the trip was the one with the longest distance and after three hours in the bus, we finally arrived to Diyarbakir.

We entered the new town and slowly were moving to the old town area within the city walls. We entered the old town through the famous "Mardin Gate". Good to know that the famous Mardin Gate is located in Diyarbakir and not in Mardin as many people think. (Including me until this moment 😊)

A part of the trip was a walk on the city walls. Diyarbakır is surrounded by a dramatic set of high walls
of black basalt forming a 5.5 km circle around the old city.
There are four gates into the old city and 82 watch-towers on the walls. Good to know: the walls of Diyarbakir in the
world after the Great Wall of China is the second largest city walls.

From the City walls we went to the Great Mosque. The Great Mosque of Diyarbakir is the oldest and one of the most
significant mosques in Anatolia. Following the Muslim capture of
Diyarbakir in 639, a church in the city was used in part as a mosque.
The church was eventually fully converted to a mosque, but the building
fell into disuse and ruin. In 1091 Sultan Malik Shah directed the local
Seljuk governor Maidud Davla to rebuild a mosque on the site. Completed
in 1092, the mosque is similar to and heavily influenced by the Umayyad Great
Mosque in Damascus. The influence of the Damascus
mosque brought Syrian architecture and decoration to Anatolia.

We finished the trip to Diyarbakir with a visit to the house of Cahit Sitki Taranci, a Turkish poet and author. His house is a typical example of the architecture of Dikarbakir.

About Diyarbakir:

Amid was the capital of the Aramean kingdom Bet-Zamani from the 13th century B.C. onwards, and later part of the Neo Assyrian Empire. Amid is the name used in the Syriac sources, which also testifies to the fact that it once was the seat of the Church of the East Patriarch and thus an original Assyrian/Syriac stronghold that produced many famous Assyrian theologians and Patriarchs. Some of them found their final resting place in St. Mary Church. There are many relics in the Church, such as the bones of the apostle Thomas and St. Jacob of Sarug.

The city was called Amida when the region was under the rule of the Roman and the succeeding Byzantine Empires.

From 189 BC to 384 AD, the area to the east and south of present-day Diyarbakir, was ruled by a kingdom known as Corduene.

In 359, Shapur II of Persia captured Amida after a siege of 73 days. The Roman soldiers and a large part of the population of the town were massacred by the Persians. The siege is vividly described by the Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus who was an eyewitness of the event and survived the massacre by escaping from the town.

Armenian historians at one time hypothesized that Diyarbakir was the site of the ancient Armenian city of Tigranakert, and by the 19th century the Armenian inhabitants were referring to the city as Dikranagerd. Scholarly research has shown that while the ancient Armenian city was close by, it was not in the same place. The real location of Dikranagerd remains the subject of debate, but Armenians who trace their ancestry to Diyarbakir continue to refer to themselves as "Dikranagerdtsi" The "Dikranagerdtsis" or Armenians of Diyarbakir were noted for having one of the most unusual dialects of Armenian, one difficult for a speaker of standard Armenian to understand.

In 639 the city was captured by the Arab armies of Islam and it remained in Arab hands until the Kurdish dynasty of Marwanid ruled the area during the 10th and 11th centuries. After the Battle of Manzikert in 1071, the city came under the rule of the Mardin branch of Oghuz Turks and then the Anatolian beylik of Artuqids. The whole area was then disputed between the Ilkhanate and Ayyubid dynasties for a century, after which it was taken over by the rising Turkmen states of Kara Koyunlu (the Black Sheep) first and Ak Koyunlu (the White Sheep). It was also ruled by Sultanate of Rûm between 1241-1259.

The city became part of the Ottoman Empire during Sultan Süleyman I's campaign of Irakeyn in 1534. The Ottoman eyalet of Diyarbakir corresponded to Turkey's southeastern provinces today, a rectangular area between the Lake Urmia to Palu and from the southern shores of Lake Van to Cizre and the beginnings of the Syrian desert, although its borders saw some changes over time. The city was an important military base for controlling this region and at the same time a thriving city noted for its craftsmen, producing glass and metalwork. For example the doors of Mevlana's tomb in Konya were made in Diyarbakir, as were the gold and silver decorated doors of the tomb of Imam-i Azam in Baghdad.

In the 19th century, Diyarbakir prison gained infamy throughout the Ottoman Empire as a site where political prisoners from the enslaved Balkan ethnic groups were sent to serve harsh sentences for speaking or fighting for national freedom.

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