Diyarbakır Walls and Hevsel Gardens: The Memory of Stone

At a Glance

The walls of Diyarbakır, a city on the upper Tigris in the mostly Kurdish southeast of modern Turkey, run for about 5.8 kilometres. They are built of black basalt. Eighty-two towers rise along the circuit; the UNESCO file records 63 inscriptions in the stone.
The main body is Roman. Most sources tie today's line to the great expansion of the year 349. Every administration that followed added to this wall and repaired it.
"The longest wall after the Great Wall of China" is a much-repeated comparison. It shifts with the measure you choose. What is certain is the wall's own dimensions.
The Ulu Beden and Seven Brothers towers were built in 1208-1209 by the Artuqid ruler Melik Salih Mahmud. The inscriptions carry the architect's name as well.
The stone is basalt from the Karacadağ volcano. One of the city's old names, Kara Amid (Black Amid), comes from it.
The Hevsel Gardens are a belt of market gardens between the walls and the Tigris. They have fed the city for thousands of years. Evliya Çelebi, the great Ottoman traveller, recorded their watermelons in 1655.
In 2015 the site entered the UNESCO World Heritage List as the "Diyarbakır Fortress and Hevsel Gardens Cultural Landscape."
In 1932 the provincial governor of the day had part of the walls torn down. A report by the French archaeologist Albert Gabriel stopped the demolition.
These stones belong to no single people. They carry the labour and the memory of Armenians, Syriacs, Kurds, Arabs and many more.

Late afternoon at the Mardin Gate. An old man walks along the foot of the wall, his grandchild's hand in his. He stops. He presses the child's palm flat against the stone. The stone still holds the day's sun inside it. It is warm.

"Do you know who built this wall?" the man asks. The child shrugs. "Everyone," the man says. "A Roman mason, an Armenian stonecutter, a Kurdish labourer, an Arab architect. Whoever came laid a stone."

The child looks up. On the crown of the tower a carving comes into focus: a double-headed eagle. Below it, writing he cannot read. Letters cut by a master eight hundred years ago, deepening into shadow in the evening light.

Cities forget. People move on, languages fall quiet, neighbourhoods change hands. Stone does not forget so easily. The walls of Diyarbakır are a ledger that still carries every age written onto them. In this article we open that ledger, slowly.

A Stone Ledger: How Do You Read the Layers?

The city's old name is Amida. Most researchers tie the Amedi that appears in Assyrian records to this settlement. So there was a city here before the wall: a slope facing the Tigris, a fertile valley, roads through the passes.

The main body of the walls still standing is Roman work. Most sources point the same way: the Roman administration enlarged the city in the fourth century, and in 349 it expanded the walls close to today's line. How old is 349? Only nineteen years after the founding of Constantinople, the city we now call Istanbul.

Is it right, then, to call this a "Roman wall"? It would be incomplete. Rome raised the body; every later hand added to it. Byzantium repaired it. Arab administrations left writing over the gates. The Marwanids, Seljuks, Artuqids, Aqqoyunlu and Ottomans raised towers, closed breaches, hammered in inscriptions. The UNESCO file counts 63 inscriptions on the walls. Each one is a signature: we were here, we laid this stone.

Dr. Mehrdad R. Izady confirms the point in an architectural note: Greek and Roman writers had already remarked on Diyarbakır's jet-black basalt wall blocks. The wall has been a subject of writing for close to seventeen hundred years. That is what we mean by a ledger in stone.

The Measurements: The Wall's Own Numbers

Look at the numbers. The circuit runs about 5.8 kilometres. The curtain walls stand seven to eight metres high in most places; at the towers that height reaches ten to twelve metres. The wall is three to five metres thick. Eighty-two towers line the body. The city was entered through four main gates: the Mountain Gate, the Urfa Gate, the Mardin Gate and the New Gate.

Then there is the famous line: "the longest city wall in the world after the Great Wall of China." It is a much-repeated comparison, and it lives in the language of tourism. Let us be honest. The ranking shifts with the measure. Are we counting the longest unbroken single-city wall, the total length, or the surviving portion? Change the measure and the list changes. This wall does not need that race. A ring of black stone more than five kilometres round, eighty-two towers, seventeen centuries old: its own numbers speak loudly enough.

Say also what the numbers leave out. This wall was a machine for defence: the towers were archers' nests, the gates were checkpoints, the ditches were the first obstacle. But the same wall was a border ledger. It divided who was inside from who was outside. And who stayed in, who was left out, was rewritten in every age.

Ulu Beden and the Seven Brothers: Two Towers, Two Signatures

The two most famous towers stand at the southwest corner: Ulu Beden and Yedi Kardeş, the Seven Brothers. Both were built by the Artuqid ruler Melik Salih Mahmud. The date is on record: 1208-1209. Four or five years after Crusader armies sacked Constantinople in 1204, two giant towers were rising in this valley.

Both are cut basalt, and both speak through relief. A double-headed eagle, lion figures, bands of inscription wrapping the drum: a language of power carved into stone. The inscriptions list the ruler's name and his titles. But one more name stands in the same stone: the master recorded as Yahya son of Ibrahim. Is it a small thing that an architect's name survives to us across eight hundred years?

Folk memory calls Ulu Beden "Evli Beden" too, and legends have gathered around the towers, the stories of seven brothers among them. Folk memory tells much; the document says no more than what is cut into the inscription. You can love both without confusing the two.

Basalt and Watermelon: Black Stone, Green Rind

Where does the stone come from? The answer is an extinct volcano west of the city: Karacadağ. Its lava spread across this plain, cooled, and turned to black basalt. Masters cut it, dressed it, and set it into the wall. That is why one of the city's old names is Kara Amid: black-stoned Amida.

The city's other emblem has a green rind: the watermelon. The two are the same country seen from two sides. The volcano's stone gave the wall; the river's soil gave the garden. The Diyarbakır watermelon grows in the sandy earth along the Tigris and in the Hevsel plots.

The fame is old, and documented. Evliya Çelebi came to the city in 1655 and set down its gardens: the vineyards and market gardens lie along the Şat, that is, along the Tigris, and nothing like them is found in Rum, the old Roman lands of Anatolia, or in Persia. Each melon and watermelon, he wrote, weighs forty to fifty okka and is sent as a gift from region to region. The okka is an old weight of about 1.3 kilograms, so Evliya's watermelon comes to more than fifty kilos. Evliya loves to embellish; strain the number as you read it. But the fame itself is on record, and it holds today. The records of the same century show the city's weight as well. According to Martin van Bruinessen's study of Evliya, the merchants of Diyarbekir traded with Baghdad and markets farther still; the city judge's salary was more than three times that of a judge in a small centre like Palu. The watermelon grew in the garden of a wealthy city. We told this curious traveller's whole journey through the Kurdish lands in a separate article: Evliya Çelebi in Kurdistan.

The Hevsel Gardens: The Belt That Feeds a City

Everyone who looks south from the top of the walls sees the same view: a band of deep green dropping from the foot of the wall down to the Tigris. This is the Hevsel Gardens, the city's market plots, orchards and poplar groves.

These gardens are not decoration. What are they for? Hevsel exists to feed the city. The UNESCO file describes them as the "green link" between city and river: the ring that supplies the town with food and water. Some studies push farming here back as far as eight thousand years. Such distant datings deserve caution. What is certain is this: since the city entered the written record it has been named together with these gardens, and the gardens are still under cultivation today. Gardeners still go down to the water's edge in the dark before dawn.

And Hevsel does not feed only people. The gardens and the riverbank are shelter for birds; many species have been recorded in the area. A little further along the river stands the Ten-Eyed Bridge. Its inscription gives the year 1065 and Marwanid rule; the Marwanids were a Kurdish dynasty. Here the researchers divide. One group reads the inscription as a record of construction; the other reads it as a record of repair and holds that the bridge may be older. That, too, is a page of the stone ledger: less an answer than a well-asked question.

What Have the Walls Seen?

A wall's memory begins with sieges. The oldest and best-documented testimony comes from 359. That year a Sasanian army laid siege to Amida. One of the Roman officers in the city was the historian Ammianus Marcellinus. The siege lasted seventy-three days; the city fell; Ammianus managed to escape and wrote down what he had seen. The date is on record and the witness has a name. Later centuries brought other armies before the same wall: the city passed from Byzantium to Arab administrations, then to the Marwanids, the Seljuks, the Artuqids, the Aqqoyunlu. It entered Ottoman rule in 1515. The book that wrote that century's Kurdish world from the inside, the Sharafnama, we also told on its own: the Sharafnama of 1597, the first Kurdish history.

Then comes a strange page. The wall that armies could not bring down took its worst damage from a planning decision. In 1932 the governor of the day began demolition around the Mountain Gate, on the grounds that "the city cannot breathe." A large section of the wall was lost. What stopped the demolition was a report sent to Ankara by the French archaeologist Albert Gabriel, who had documented Anatolia inch by inch. A foreigner's report saved a city's wall. In what spirit should one read that sentence? Let the reader decide.

The recent page is short, and it stings. The fighting between late 2015 and the spring of 2016 destroyed part of the historic fabric in the Sur district; the damage entered the records through UNESCO monitoring and official restoration tenders. This article's work is testimony. It notes the record and leaves the argument to the documents. The wall descriptions left by nineteenth-century Western travellers are the subject of another article: Western travellers among the Kurds.

2015: What Does the World Heritage Listing Say?

The date is on record: in 2015 the UNESCO World Heritage Committee, at its 39th session in Bonn, Germany, added the site to the list. The full name of the entry is this: "Diyarbakır Fortress and Hevsel Gardens Cultural Landscape."

What does "cultural landscape" mean? It means an area that human labour and nature have woven together, the two inseparable. The Committee did not register the wall alone; it registered the living relationship between the wall and the river. The parts that entered the file show it: the inner fortress and the Amida Mound, the 5.8 kilometres of walls, the Hevsel Gardens, the Anzele spring and the Ten-Eyed Bridge.

What does this listing mean? Not pride but obligation. World Heritage status ties the protection of the area to international monitoring. The stone ledger now belongs not only to the city but to humanity's inventory.

A Many-Peopled Memory: Who Owns the Stones?

No single people's city lived inside this wall. In the Diyarbekir bazaar, Kurdish, Armenian, Arabic, Syriac and Turkish could be heard in a single day. The neighbourhoods were built along lines of faith and language, and so was the craft. Armenian and Syriac labour in stonemasonry is among the visible layers of the city's building tradition.

The traces are still in place. The courtyard of the Great Mosque carries almost a thousand years of writing, one hand over another. Surp Giragos, one of the largest Armenian churches in the Middle East, reopened after restoration in 2011, took heavy damage in the fighting of 2015 and 2016, and opened once again in 2022. In the Church of the Virgin Mary a small Syriac congregation keeps up its worship.

The heaviest page of this memory is 1915. The destruction that the city's Armenian and Syriac people suffered that year is argued out, with documents, in the İsmail Beşikçi Foundation's book "1915 Diyarbekir ve Kürtler Sempozyumu" (1915 Diyarbekir and the Kurds Symposium); the subject can only be done justice in dedicated work like that. Here we set down the record in a single sentence: the wall stands, and some of the city's peoples are gone. The blank pages of the stone ledger are memory too.

Is the word finished? It is not. The Tigris runs on downstream, and on the bank of that same river another city of stone, Hasankeyf, went under the water. We wrote that story too: twelve thousand years underwater. Walls do not fall silent. They only count as silent when we stop listening.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long are the Diyarbakır walls, and how many towers do they have? The circuit runs about 5.8 kilometres, and eighty-two towers stand along the body. The curtain walls reach seven to eight metres, the towers ten to twelve metres, and the thickness runs from three to five metres. The UNESCO file records 63 inscriptions in the walls.

What period are the walls from? The main body is Roman; most sources tie today's line to the expansion of the year 349. The towers and inscriptions above it carry the additions of every period from Byzantium to the Ottomans. So there is no single date. There is date layered upon date.

Who built the Ulu Beden and Seven Brothers towers? Both were built by the Artuqid ruler Melik Salih Mahmud in 1208-1209. Their cut-basalt drums carry reliefs of a double-headed eagle and lions, and their inscriptions name both the ruler and the architect.

Why do the Hevsel Gardens matter? They are the belt of market gardens between the walls and the Tigris, and they have fed the city for thousands of years. Evliya Çelebi praised their melons and watermelons in 1655. The gardens are still cultivated today and are part of the UNESCO site.

When did the site enter the UNESCO list? In 2015, at the World Heritage Committee's 39th session in Bonn. The full name of the entry is "Diyarbakır Fortress and Hevsel Gardens Cultural Landscape," and it covers the inner fortress, the walls, the Hevsel Gardens, the Anzele spring and the Ten-Eyed Bridge.

Sources and Further Reading

Primary sources (from the Bedel Boseli Collection):

Martin van Bruinessen, "Kurdistan in the 16th and 17th Centuries, as Reflected in Evliya Çelebi's Seyahatname", The Journal of Kurdish Studies 3 (2000): Evliya's 1655 stop in Diyarbekir, its long-distance merchants and the judge's-salary measure come from here. The watermelon note is from the Diyarbekir chapter of the Seyahatname.
Dr. Mehrdad R. Izady, The Kurds: A Concise Handbook (4th edition): the section on Diyarbakır's black basalt wall blocks and the Greek and Roman writers who remarked on the wall.
1915 Diyarbekir ve Kürtler Sempozyumu (İsmail Beşikçi Foundation Publications): the essential collection for the city's memory of 1915.

Social Media Summaries

The following summaries are ready to share; copy and use them.

Rome laid the body; every later hand added to it. The walls of Diyarbakır are a ledger in stone, signed with 82 towers and 63 inscriptions. Seventeen centuries of memory, for those who can read it: bedelboseli.com/en/diyarbakir-walls-and-hevsel-gardens
Evliya Çelebi wrote it down in 1655: Diyarbekir's gardens run along the Tigris, its watermelons reach fifty okka, its fruit is sent as gifts from region to region. The Hevsel Gardens are still worked today: bedelboseli.com/en/diyarbakir-walls-and-hevsel-gardens
In 2015 the world put it on record: the Diyarbakır Fortress and Hevsel Gardens Cultural Landscape joined the UNESCO World Heritage List. One file for the wall and the garden together: bedelboseli.com/en/diyarbakir-walls-and-hevsel-gardens
Armies could not bring the wall down. In 1932 a city-planning decision began to. A report by the French archaeologist Albert Gabriel stopped it. The narrow escape of a 1,700-year-old wall: bedelboseli.com/en/diyarbakir-walls-and-hevsel-gardens
These stones belong to no single people. The Armenian stonecutter, the Syriac master, the Kurdish gardener, the Arab merchant: their labour stands in the same wall. Diyarbakır's many-peopled memory: bedelboseli.com/en/diyarbakir-walls-and-hevsel-gardens