A day in Diyarbakir

As the plane touched down in Diyarbakir on Sunday, I was a little nervous. I was officially entering the most conservative area I’ve ever been in, and my normal obsession with properly observing social mores was thrown into overdrive in a culture that I knew nothing about. I was almost the only woman on the plane without a headscarf.

Once we made it into the city, however, my worries began to ease. Diyarbakir is one of the largest cities in Turkey and although Southeast Turkey is more conservative than the rest of the country, I saw plenty of women dressed just like me.

My worries eased, I began to concentrate on taking in this new city. Jon and I checked into Hotel Birkent, a clean but fairly bare bones operation with a toilet that requires one foot to be in the shower in order to sit on it properly. Once we settled in and got ourselves a hearty Kurdish breakfast (the saltiest cheese I’ve ever tasted, intense yogurt, cucumbers, tomatoes, an egg, bread and of course, chai) Jon and I hit the city so he could show me a few highlights.

First, the bazaar, where I picked up a headscarf to explore the mosques. The shopkeepers took every opportunity to lament to us that U.S. had beat Turkey the night before in the world cup.
Then, knowing me so well, Jon took me to the cheese market – the Kurds, it turns out, are as besotted with cheese as I am, and there’s a whole market dedicated to these aged delights. One of their most popular cheeses, a tangy crumbly kind that’s often found with platters of mezze, is buried under the ground for a year to age properly. I was enthralled with the giant blobs of cheese just sitting on the table waiting to be gobbled up – the cheese sellers couldn’t miss my absolute delight, and kept giving us pieces to try. Along with the cheese (it just kept getting better) were olives and honey, straight off farms outside the city.



Then, on to the Otel Büyük Kervansaray, a resting spot built for pilgrims traveling along the silk road in the 1500s that is still being used as a hotel today. While we wandered the grounds, a man who worked there noticed us and began to talk with us. His English was surprisingly good, because he has worked with the U.S. army for a while and has since operated a souvenir shop and tours of the Kurdish areas of northern Iraq and southeast Turkey. He invited us into his shop for tea and later we agreed to meet for more chai after dinner.


Our final stop was a climb of Diyarbakir’s city walls, which are the second largest in the world, after the great wall of china and date back to the Byzantine era. From our vantage point at the top of the walls, we could see a river and ancient bridge that cut through endless fields of farmland.

[Inside the walls, we found an art show and teahouse]

Diyarbakir has subtle delights for tourists. It isn’t old in the way that I know old – not the old of western Europe, the kind of old that has been lovingly restored then put to some twee use. This city has been lived in – roughly, robustly, continually – since before Christ was born and people just don’t think twice about it. Men still gather just outside the mosque, one of the oldest in turkey, to tell stories with each other. Through a cobbled alley, a townhouse built and rebuilt over hundreds of years serves up chai and Kurdish dishes on large cushions in a big courtyard. And in the bazaar, cobblers and blacksmiths work alongside spice shops filled with huge burlap bags of herbs I couldn’t name.


[Jon and an old friend, the proprietor of this hidden wonder of a restaurant, with my first taste of Sac Tava – my taste buds rejoiced!]

Outside the city walls, the city is more modern, with street after street of soviet style six-story pastel apartment buildings. Down the main street outside of town is a long row of chaihanas, or tea shops, where men meet and play backgammon. We ended the night there with our new friend Mehmet and Jon’s old friends from the city, drinking endless cups of chai and smoking apple flavored hookah.