By William Gourlay
If you present a map of Turkey to a traveler and ask them to pinpoint key cities, chances are they will immediately identify İstanbul, the great metropolis on the Bosphorus. Some would also be able to highlight Ankara, the capital, but beyond that choices may be limited. Few cities in Turkey’s Anatolian interior catch the eye. In the popular imagination, İstanbul and Ankara, sitting in Turkey’s western portion, are quintessentially Turkish cities, but further east things become more complicated. Diyarbakır, a city of 1.8 million that straddles the River Tigris in southeastern Anatolia, is a case in point. It boasts a history stretching back millennia, yet it is little known and it resides in Turkey’s periphery both geographically–-it is a short distance from the Syrian and Iraqi borders-–and politically-–it has a majority Kurdish population. Many locals refer to it by its Kurdish name, Amed; during my first visit to the city in 1992 I was told that it was a Kurdish city rather than a Turkish one, a message that has been continuously reiterated to me. Accordingly, many Turks regard it with suspicion. In many regards Diyarbakır has acted as a barometer of the political climate in modern Turkey through initial periods of nation-building and attempts at ethnic homogenization and, more recently, as democratization flourished only to be followed by a turn towards authoritarianism. Ongoing contestations between the Turkish state and Kurdish citizens, militants, and political parties have shaped its character, political life, and very urban fabric in ways that mark it as different from any other city in Turkey.
Gateway to Mesopotamia
In 349 C.E., Emperor Constantius II fortified Amida, as Diyarbakır was then known, on the eastern border of Roman territory. Constructing formidable defensive walls, Constantius probably thought that he was guaranteeing the city’s security. Such hopes proved short-lived. Within a decade a Persian army had overrun the metropolis. Then in 639, Arab warriors of the Bekir tribe absorbed it into their ever-expanding Islamic empire, renaming it after themselves: Diyarbekir. Later it passed between a succession of Turkic dynasties, Persian rulers and Mongol warlords, ultimately falling in 1514 to the Ottoman sultans, who maintained their rule for 400 years.
Even if the walls–still the second-longest continuous land walls in the world–rarely thwarted invaders, their enclosure of Diyarbekir became the city’s defining feature. Built of forbidding black basalt, they contained the historic Sur district, a maze of narrow cobbled alleys, mosques, churches, caravanserais and konaks (mansions), where a distinctive architectural style evolved. The black stone of the walls, buildings and alleyways also became entwined in the name of the city, with some during the Ottoman period referring to it as Kara Hamid[1] (from kara, the Turkish word for “black.”)
The lifeblood of historic Diyarbekir, the Mesopotamian city, was trade. Merchants and mendicants entered the city through four main gates in the basalt walls. Bazaars, caravanserais and religious buildings were arrayed along the north-south and east-west axes linking the gates. The famed Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi arrived in 1655, noting the buzz of the marketplaces where blacksmiths crafted scimitars, axes and daggers, alongside jewelers and goldsmiths, boot makers, saddlers and kettle makers.[2] He reveled in the city’s cultural and religious atmosphere, documenting encounters with poets and musicians and observing several medreses (Islamic seminaries) and Sufi shaykhs.[3] Outside the city walls in the fertile Hevsel Gardens, recently listed by UNESCO as world heritage sites, Evliya declared the “basil gardens and regularly laid out vegetable plots on the bank of the Tigris have no equal in Turkey, Arabia or Persia.”
Straddling key trade routes, and lying at the fringes of Turkish, Persian and Arab spheres, historic Diyarbekir also saw the intermingling of peoples of many faiths and ethnicities. Evliya recounted hearing Arabic, Turkish, Persian, Kurdish and Armenian spoken in the streets.[4] In the early 20th century, the city and surrounding province were home to Armenians, Kurds, Turks, Jews, Yezidis, Kızılbaş (Alevis), Zaza, Syriacs, Greeks and Arabic speakers.[5] However, by this time the once-mighty Ottoman Empire was in terminal decline. Famine and interethnic conflict wrought havoc, particularly across southeastern Anatolia, including Diyarbakır province, where after 1915 violent events saw the virtual elimination of Armenian and Assyrian communities and the deportation of some Kurdish tribes.[6]
Incorporation into Turkey?
When the founders of the modern state of Turkey established the republic in 1923, they regarded ethnic uniformity as the key to stability. They had seen the Ottoman Empire fragment as Greeks, Bulgarians and others had established homelands, but as Turkish forces expelled European powers after World War I Anatolia now represented a purportedly clean slate for them. Through a process of Türkleştirme (Turkification), they sought to engineer a homogenous–hence unified–nation-state. This was a pressing issue in southeastern Anatolia, which as one historian observes was notable for its “lack of Turkishness,”[7] the urgency compounded by Kurds’ desires to establish their own homeland.
Sure enough, the first major rebellion against the Turkish nation-building project arose in the southeast when a Sufi notable, Sheikh Said, led an uprising of Kurdish rebels, who marched on Diyarbakır in 1925. Here, for once, the defensive walls proved effective and the city did not fall, but the uprising could only be subdued after martial law was imposed and 35,000 Turkish reinforcements were brought into the region.[8] Sheikh Said was duly hanged in Diyarbakır in a demonstration of state power, but officials remained suspicious of restive locals and viewed the city as resistant to modernization, a threat to the territorial and political unity of Turkey.[9] The famous Turkish author Yaşar Kemal wrote that Diyarbakır was torn between conflicting desires for tradition and modernity.[10] For the government, its Kurdish-majority population highlighted its problematic status and the Sheikh Said uprising marked it as a center of confrontation.
The state’s response, then, was to attempt to engineer a landscape, city, and population that conformed to the ideals of the new republic. At various times the use of the Kurdish language was outlawed, and across Anatolia Turkish names were imposed on villages, towns and locations that had previously had Kurdish or other non-Turkish names.[11] Diyarbakır, too, received this treatment, the historic title of Diyarbekir being replaced with its current name as it was more “Turkish sounding.” Re-annotations of the map aside, authorities also undertook measures that would allow greater state control. During the 1930s, the governor of Diyarbakır decided the ancient walls did not allow the city to “breathe” and began tearing them down, an activity only ended due to the intervention of a visiting French archaeologist.[12]
Turkey’s founding president, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, later visited to inaugurate the first railway line and urged a range of “improvements” that would reorder Diyarbakır’s urban texture and render the city more manageable. Such “modernity” was intended to facilitate the assertion of central control, and certain historical sites, particularly those of significance to non-Muslim communities, were entirely neglected.[13] Simultaneously, a new educational system was implemented, with high schools in Diyarbakır aiming to mold Kurdish youth into dutiful participants in the building of a unified Turkish nation-state. [14] Meanwhile, a sizable Turkish garrison was installed, guardians of the new republic in this peripheral region characterized by ethnic diversity and troubling political tendencies.
These measures, however, did not prove particularly effective in Turkifying the region. Even an influx of ethnic Turks after the 1930s had the opposite effect to that intended: Turkish settlers gradually became Kurdified rather than Turkifying the locals.[15] In 1958, Musa Anter, a Kurdish intellectual, published in Diyarbakır İleri Yürt, the first of several journals that promoted Kurdish national identity, and by the 1970s leftist political organizations were mushrooming in Turkey, some of them aligned with a burgeoning Kurdish nationalist movement.[16] Most notably, in 1977, Mehdi Zana, promoting an overtly leftist, pro-Kurdish agenda, won the mayoralty in Diyarbakır, encouraging the speaking of Kurdish in the city. Zana was removed from office and imprisoned after the 1980 military coup, during which political freedoms were curtailed. Nonetheless, Zana’s brief ascendance marked an upheaval in local political dynamics in south-eastern Anatolia, with Diyarbakır, as it had in 1925, pursuing its own political trajectory rather than one prescribed by the state.[17]
Center of Confrontation: Military and Political
Turkey’s internal politics were further disrupted in 1984, with the emergence of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which embarked on a self-declared “anti-colonial” struggle against the Turkish state. As conflict escalated, Diyarbakır came to assume an outsized role in Turkish politics. The state’s military campaign against the PKK army saw the evacuation and destruction of numerous Kurdish villages, spurring an influx of refugees into Diyarbakır. Throughout the 1990s, the population tripled and the city expanded physically as shanty towns spilled out beyond the historic walls. With this came a range of problems associated with rapid urban growth including unemployment, poverty, excessive strains on local services, and overcrowding, which only served to exacerbate the political grievances of both locals and new arrivals.[18]
The heavy hand of the state did little to calm tensions. Much-loved Kurdish intellectual Musa Anter was murdered in Diyarbakır in 1992, apparently by Turkish security agents, a fate that allegedly also befell Kurdish human rights activist Vedat Aydin and Diyarbakır Prison became notorious for human rights abuses carried out against Kurds. In general, the repressive measures of security forces in and around Diyarbakır increased the popularity of the PKK while also stirring up anger towards the state.[19] In a narrow alley in Sur, I once noticed graffiti scrawled on a wall: “PKK halktır.” (“The PKK is the people.”)
Amid ongoing conflict and the state’s counterinsurgency measures, Diyarbakir thus became a symbolic in two diametrically opposed ways. For Turks its outlaw status grew more pronounced–I was once warned by Turks against visiting the city due to its associations with violence and terrorism–while for Kurds, the city assumed a political resonance. Meanwhile, in conversations too many to recount, Kurds have assured me of its potency as a historical site, and center of resistance, political and cultural activities, such that it is regarded as a central pole of Kurdish identity.
The conflict against the PKK during the 1990s had a pervasive impact on Turkish politics. The state acted with a heavy hand, declaring martial law in the southeast, restricting civil rights and ruthlessly striking at “terrorists,” some calling into Turkey’s democratic credentials. Here, again, Diyarbakır assumed a significance larger than its status as a provincial capital would suggest. In 1999, then Prime Minister Mesut Yılmaz remarked that “the road to the EU passes through Diyarbakır,” highlighting that solving the Kurdish issue, which required winning the hearts and minds of the city’s residents, would expedite democratization, thus helping Turkey’s goal of joining the EU.
The victory of the Halkın Demokrasi Partisi (literally, People’s Democracy Party, HADEP), a pro-Kurdish party, in municipal elections in Diyarbakır further brought it into the spotlight. This was a watershed moment: never before had a party that was entwined with the wider Kurdish movement won political power through democratic means. Some claim that the HADEP and its officials thereafter began a process of “decolonization,” working to redress and reverse the homogenizing initiatives and policies of the Turkish state that had been in place for seventy years.[20]
The HADEP municipal administration set about revitalizing the city. This included launching cultural programs and festivals and refurbishing the long-neglected city walls, promoted as a way of protecting Diyarbakır’s historical legacy.[21] The preliminary goal was to “Kurdify” the city, namely to highlight its Kurdish heritage, but a broader goal was to highlight its multi-ethnic heritage. In 2008, the Kurdish mayor of Diyarbakır’s Sur district, Abdullah Demirbaş, stated, “I am not working for the Kurds; I am working for all people.”[22] Evidence of this shift in the imaginary of the city is visible on the very walls of the Sülüklü Han, a refurbished 17th-century caravanserai in Sur, where a panel outlines a history of the building in six languages (and four scripts): Turkish, Syriac, Armenian and Kurdish dialects of Kurmanji, Sorani and Zazaki. Such a sign would have been unthinkable during the years of Turkish “colonization,” but a Kurdish university student once told me that this was merely recognizing the “historical reality” that the city had always hosted a diverse citizenry.
AKP rule: New Freedoms, Then Renewed Conflict
The ascendance of the AKP (Justice and Development Party) in the general election of 2002 marked a broader shake up of Turkish politics. Initially the AKP was distinctly different from the nationalist-inclined governments that preceded it. The AKP appeared intent upon reconceptualizing the national project away from one narrowly defined along ethnic–that is, Turkish–lines and began to acknowledge and accommodate ethnic and religious diversity. This saw a decline in the intensity of conflict in Turkey’s southeast and several state-led initiatives to resolve the Kurdish issue.
Diyarbakır, once at the epicenter of the conflict, enjoyed a moment of respite. The oppressive military presence was gradually lifted, cultural and artistic programs instituted by the municipality blossomed, and local Armenian and Chaldean (Assyrian) communities grew more confident, reopening long-shuttered churches. Optimism reigned in a region long beset by conflict and Diyarbakır remained at the center of events, in 2013 becoming the venue for the announcement of a long-awaited PKK ceasefire, [23] which was hoped to herald a new era of peace and prosperity for the city and for Turkey’s Kurdish population. Locals also became more confident in asserting the city’s Kurdish identity, with its Kurdish name, Amed, being more commonly used. Meanwhile, Turkish attitudes toward the city changed too. Due in part to its being featured in a Turkish TV series,[24] the city welcomed increasing numbers of tourists from Istanbul and Ankara who began visiting.
The good times were not to last, however. The AKP lost its parliamentary majority in the general election of June 2015, largely due to the success of the Halkların Demokrasi Partisi (HDP), which, in a first for a pro-Kurdish party, won over 10 percent of the national vote, thus exceeding a parliamentary threshold to take seats in the national assembly. The political aftershocks were felt in southeastern Anatolia where conflict erupted again, ending the short-lived ceasefire.
PKK operatives, buoyed by the success of Kurdish-led militia fighting against ISIS in neighboring Syria, brought the battle to Diyarbakır and other cities of the southeast, building barricades and declaring autonomy from Turkey. This proved to be a tactical blunder of epic proportions. While Diyarbakır had long seen protests and minor confrontations between locals and state security operatives, it had never been the epicenter of actual military combat. The state’s response to the PKK in this instance was swift and merciless, bringing the full force of its military capacity to bear on Diyarbakır’s Sur district.
During ensuing clashes, which continued for several months, up to 20,000 residents were displaced, state authorities closed local media, imprisoned journalists, and installed administrators to replace local officials, and significant portions of the Sur quarter were entirely leveled. Six of Sur’s 15 neighborhoods suffered physical destruction. Such was the extent of the devastation that Mıgırdıç Margosyan, a prominent local author, claimed that upon returning to the neighborhood he could not even find the street where his house used to be, while an assessment conducted by the local municipality detailed extensive damage to historic sites, including mosques, shops and museum, as well as the partial or total destruction of streetscapes and civilian architecture that were unique to Diyarbakır.
Reconstituting Sur?
In early 2016, then prime minister, Ahmet Davutoǧlu recognised the extent of destruction in Diyarbakır in setting out government plans to rebuild the Sur quarter just as Toledo had been after the Spanish Civil War. Davutoǧlu’s statement was met with scorn from Kurds, in Diyarbakır and elsewhere. Former mayor Abdullah Demirbaş despaired that much of the work to rebuild the city’s multi-ethnic fabric had been undone.[25] There was also concern that the rebuilding of Sur would allow a degree of top-down control that the government had never previously had over the city.
Despite the misgivings of locals, the government went ahead with the rebuilding project after first appropriating large portions of Sur, and bringing in demolition teams to raze neighborhoods that had been impacted by conflict. As ever in Diyarbakır, different voices promoted divergent narratives. In 2017, new Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım argued that PKK operatives were responsible for the destruction of the urban fabric of the city. Others argue that lightly armed PKK militia never had hardware or firepower capable of wreaking such devastation, and, using the pretext of the war, that the state razed more areas than were strictly necessary in order to extend its control. And, as ever, the concerns of Diyarbakır locals were largely overlooked as many residents were ordered to evacuate ahead of the rebuilding program, which aimed to build 35,000 new homes across southeastern Anatolia.
Former prime minister Davutoǧlu had argued that reconstruction in Diyarbakır would incorporate Seljuk and Ottoman architectural elements to ensure the historic ambience of the city would be retained, but it would seem that the manageability of the city was also a primary consideration. Where previously winding alleyways and narrow streets had given the neighborhoods their distinctive characters, broad avenues were planned. In effect, these plans enabled the state to fashion the city into separate “security service zones” that could be monitored and between which security forces could be efficiently moved.[26] There were parallels, too, with Haussman’s construction of broad boulevards Paris in the 1850s, which, some allege, were partially intended to help authorities prevent revolutionaries from operating.[27] The plans also echoed some of the ideas mooted in the 1930s when the state-appointed governor had determined that the walled city be allowed to “breathe.” As such, the government, after removing Diyarbakır’s popularly elected mayors on grounds of “terrorism” and replacing them with “trustees,” was able to resume reconfiguring the city fabric to serve state rather than local ends, something that had been denied to it during the years of pro-Kurdish municipal control.
Reconstruction is an ongoing project in Sur. Pro-government voices continue to assert that the state is acting responsibly in creating a livable environment from the destruction wrought by the PKK. On a visit to the city in summer 2024, I walked down wide boulevards in the recently rebuilt eastern quarter. New shops and housing developments have been tastefully constructed, if not entirely in keeping with the ambience of the old city, and visitors and local Christian congregations frequented the grounds of the Armenian Surp Giragos Church and Chaldean Church of Mar Petyun. At first glance, normal life has resumed.
But there remains a lot of empty, undeveloped ground, where previously there had been a maze of basalt alleys and historic homes, and many residents who were displaced during the conflict remain unable to return to their old neighborhoods. One shopkeeper I spoke to said he lived in one of the newly constructed housing units but he preferred the city as it used to be. Significantly, the new neighborhoods lack the atmosphere of the old. My visit coincided with Kurban Bayram, the most important religious holiday of the year, a week when businesses close and extended families convene to eat, shop and go sightseeing together. I strolled the new boulevards one evening past freshly planted crepe myrtle trees and a succession of new air-conditioned ice cream parlors and brand stores. They sparkled with downlights and polished tiles but were largely empty of patrons. Meanwhile, the hans, alleys of the old quarters and the square around the central Grand Mosque, were buzzing. Throngs of families gathered at kebab stands or bought helium balloons and cones of sugared almonds from wandering peddlers.
Diyarbakır seemed to me, once again, to reflect the broader currents of Turkey’s politics, as it had many times before–attempts at homogenization and assimilation during the 1920s and 1930s, heightened ethnic identification in the 1990s, and, in the early 2000s, greater political freedoms, which have since been curtailed. It struck me as a city pulled in two directions. Even in neighborhoods reconstituted after conflict, opposing forces are at work: the state directive of a newly organized and manageable city and the naturally boisterous, organic urban rhythms that have taken shape over centuries. At Keçi Burnu, the grand gate at the southern end of town, this was brought starkly to light. An oversized Turkish flag fluttered over the city walls, but beneath it a trio of teenage boys stood smoking illicit cigarettes in the shadows and calling loudly to their friends in Kurdish.
William Gourlay is a writer and researcher with a focus on Turkey and the Balkans. He currently teaches Middle East politics and history at Monash University, Australia, and was previously a Research Associate in the Middle East Studies Forum at Deakin University, Australia. He has worked as a teacher, journalist, and editor in London, İzmir (Turkey), and his native Melbourne. His book The Kurds in Erdoǧan’s Turkey was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2020.
Featured image: Diyarbakir and its City Wall and Battlements, May 30, 2011, courtesy of Wikimedia.
[1] See for example, Geoffry Lewis (translator) (1974) The Book of Dede Korkut, (London: Penguin).
[2] Robert Dankoff and Sooyong Kim (translators) (2010) An Ottoman traveller: selections from the Book of Travels of Evliya Celebi, (London: Eland) 113.
[3] Van Bruinessen, Martin and Hendrik Boeschoten (editors) (1988) Evliya Çelebi in Diyarbekir. (Leiden: Brill 1988) 45.
[4] Ibid. 29.
[5] Üngör, Uğur Ümit (2012) The Making of Modern Turkey: nation and state in eastern Anatolia, 1913-50, (Oxford, Oxford University Press) 12-17.
[6] Ibid. 68-122.
[7] Ibid. 40.
[8] Van Bruinessen, Martin (1992) Agha, Sheikh and State. (London: Zed Books) 286-291.
[9] The location of his grave remains undisclosed – see Özsoy, Hisyar. (2013) ‘The Missing Grave of Sheikh Said: Kurdish Formations of Memory, Place,and Sovereignty in Turkey.’ In, Kamala Visweswaran (ed). Everyday Occupations: Experiencing Militarism in South Asia and the Middle East. (University of Pennsylvania Press). 191-220. Marilungo, Francesco (2017) “The Capital of Otherness: A Geocritical Exploration of Diyarbakır, Turkey.” In, Jason Finch, Lieven Ameel, and Markku Salmela (eds) Literary Second Cities, 131–50. (Switzerland: Springer)
[10] Kemal, Yaşar and Raşit Çavaş (2011) Röportaj yazarlığında 60 yıl. (Istanbul: YKY).
[11] Aslan, Senem (2009) “Incoherent State: The Controversy over Kurdish Naming in Turkey”. European Journal of Turkish Studies. Volume 10. http://ejts.revues.org/4142
[12] Gambetti, Zeynep (2010) ‘Decolonizing Diyarbakır: culture, identity and the struggle to appropriate urban space.’ in Kamran Asdar Ali and Martina Rieker (eds), Comparing Cities: The Middle East and South Asia, (Karachi: Oxford University Press) 103.
[13] Gambetti, 103
[14] Aydin, Delal. (2024) “Youth and Politics in Diyarbakır.” In Ayça Alemdaroglu and Fatma Müge Göçek (eds) Kurds in Dark Times. (New York: Syracuse University Press) 258-263
[15] Üngör. Making of Modern Turkey. 168.
[16] McDowall, David (2004) A Modern History of the Kurds. (London: IB Tauris) 405-412.
[17] Dorronsoro, Gilles and Nicole Watts. (2009) “Toward Kurdish distinctiveness in electoral politics: The 1977 local elections in Diyarbakir”. International Journal of Middle East Studies. 41 (3): 457–478
[18] Gambetti, 100
[19] McDowall, 427, 431
[20] Gambetti, 95-127
[21] Watts, Nicole (2010) Activists in Office: Kurdish Politics and Protest in Turkey. (Seattle: University of Washington Press) 155.
[22] Toumani, Meline (2008). “Minority Rules,” The New York Times Magazine, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/17/magazine/17turkey-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.
[23] Yackley, Ayla Jean (2013) ‘Kurd rebel leader orders fighters to halt hostilities’, Reuters, 21 March, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-turkey-kurds-idUSBRE92J0OF20130321
[24] Marilungo, Francesco (2016) ‘The City of Terrorism or a City for Breakfast: Diyarbakir’s Sense of Place in the TV Series Sultan.’ Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, Volume 9 (3)
[25] Demirbaş, Abdullah (2016) “Undoing Years of Progress in Turkey,” New York Times, January 26. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/25/opinion/undoing-years-of-progress-in-turkey.html
[26] Hakyemez, Serra, (2018) ‘Sur,’ Middle East Report 287. https://merip.org/2018/10/sur/
[27] Héron de Villefosse, René (1950) Histoire de Paris, (Paris: Union Bibliophile de France) 340.
