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Template:Infobox town TR Diyarbakır (Template:Lang-ota دیاربکر 'land of the Bekr' as derived from Persian; Kurdish Amed; Syriac ܐܡܝܕ Āmîḏ; Greek Template:Polytonic Amida; Armenian Ամիդ Amid) is a major city in the Southeastern Anatolia region of Turkey. The city is situated on the banks of the River Tigris, and is the seat of the Diyarbakır Province. In the 2000 census, the city had a population of 546,000, and its metropolitan area was home to 721,000 inhabitants, as of 2005. It is the second-largest city in Turkey's Southeastern Anatolia region, after Gaziantep. Within Turkey, Diyarbakır is famed for its culture, rich folklore and famed watermelons.

Diyarbakır has a predominately large Kurdish population,[1][2] prompting some Kurds and outside observers to often refer to it as the unofficial 'capital'[3][4] of Turkish Kurdistan.[5] This term has no administrative basis and is open to controversy. According to a November 2006 survey by the Sur Municipality, one of Diyarbakır's metropolitan municipalities, 72 % of the inhabitants of the municipality use Kurdish the most in their daily speech, followed by Turkish, and 69 % is illiterate in their most widely used vernacular.[6]

Etymology

The modern name 'Diyarbakır' originates from the Ottoman Turkish Language, which was, in turn, heavily influenced by Arabic and Persian. The phrase itself, Diyâr-i Bekr, derives directly from the Persian traduction meaning 'Land of the Bekr'. Diyar (ديار), Arabic for region or district[7], followed by the Persian ezafe "-i" and Bekr (بکر), probably denotes the landholdings of the Arab Bekr tribe that settled in the area following the Islamic conquest in the 7th Century. However, the Kurdish scholar Professor Mehrdad Izady, of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University, suggests an alternative argument in his book The Kurds: A Concise Handbook, according to which the name of the capital Amid would have been changed by the Bagirawand or Bagratid Kurdish Dynasty (the Kurdish branch of Georgian Bagrationi and Armenian Bagratuni dynasties) to refer to themselves.

History

“Amid(a)” was the capital of the Aramean kingdom Bet-Zamani from the 13th century B.C. onwards. “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 a Assyrian or Syriac stronghold that produced many famous Syriac theologians and Patriarchs; some of them found their final resting place in the St. Mary Church. There are many relics in the Church, such as the bones of the apostle Thomas and St. Jacob of Sarug (d. 521).

The city was called Amida when the region was under the rule of the Roman and then the Byzantine Empires. From 189 BCE to 384 CE, the area to the east and south of present-day Diyarbakır, was ruled by a Kurdish kingdom known as Corduene.[8] It later became a province of the Roman Empire in 66 BCE.[9]

Coffee shop in Diyarbakır, 1909

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

The Kurdish dynasty of Marwanid ruled the area of Diyarbakır during the 10th and 11th centuries CE. After the Battle of Manzikert, the city has been under the rule of the Mardin branch of Oghuz Turkish beylik (principality) of Artuklu (circa 1100-1250 in effective terms, although almost a century longer nominally). It has been disputed between the Ilkhanate and Ayyubid dynasties along with its surrounding region 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). Following the Ottoman ascendancy established by Selim I in the region, the city has become part of the Ottoman Empire since the reign of Sultan Süleyman I's campaign of Irakeyn (the two Iraqs, e.g. Arabian and Persian) in 1534, at the same time as Mosul, Baghdad and Basra.

The Ottoman eyalet of Diyarbekir covered the geography corresponding 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. In 1864, together with the passage into vilayet system, it became the seat of the Vilayet of Diyarbekir.

Armenian historians at one time hypothesized that Diyarbekir was the site of the ancient Armenian city of Tigranakert, (pronounced Dikranagerd in the Western Armenian dialect) 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 in the close vicinity, it in fact is not the same place. The real location of Dikranagerd remains debated, but Armenians who trace their ancestry to Diyarbekir continue to refer to themselves as "Dikranagerdtsi" (native of Dikranagerd.) The "Dikranagerdtsi's" or Armenians of Diyarbekir were noted for having one of the most unusual dialects of Armenian, hard to understand for a speaker of standard Armenian.

In the 19th century, Diyarbakır prison had gained infamy throughout the Ottoman Empire as a site where political prisoners from the enslaved Balkan ethnicities were sent to serve harsh sentences for speaking or fighting for national freedom.[10]

The 20th century was a turbulent one for Diyarbakır. During World War I most of the city's Syriac and Armenian population was driven from the city. After the surrender of the Ottoman Empire, French troops attempted to occupy the city.

Rural to urban movement has often been the first step in a migratory pattern that has taken large numbers of Kurds from the east to the west. Diyarbakır, the unofficial capital of Turkish Kurdistan, grew from 30,000 in the 1930s to 65,000 by 1956, to 140,000 by 1970, to 400,000 by 1990, and swelled to about 1.5 million by 1997. [11] [12]

The 41-year-old American-Turkish Pirinclik Air Force Base near Diyarbakir, known as NATO's frontier post for monitoring the former Soviet Union and the Middle East, completely closed on 30 September 1997. This return was the result of the general drawdown of US bases in Europe and improvement in space surveillance technology. The base near the southeastern city of Diyarbakir housed sensitive electronic intelligence-gathering systems that kept an ear on the Middle East, Caucasus and Russia.

Features

File:DiyarbakırSurları.jpg
Diyarbakır city walls, built by Constantius II and extended by Valentinian I between 367-375, stretch unbroken for almost 6 kilometres.

The city is surrounded by a dramatic and intact set of black basalt walls extending in a 5.5 km circle around the old city. The dramatic warren of alleyways and old-fashioned tenement blocks which makes up the old city contrast dramatically with the sprawling suburbs of modern apartment blocks and gecekondu slums to the west. Diyarbakır boasts numerous medieval mosques and madrassahs, crowned by the 11th century Ulu Cami ("Great Mosque") constructed by alternating bands of black basalt and limestone. The same patterning was used in the 16th century Deliler Han Madrassah, which is now a hotel, and the 12th century Castle Mosque (Kale Camii).

Icon of St Ephrem the Syrian (306 – 373) who is specially venerated by Syriac Christians - from Meryem Ana Kilisesi, Diyarbakır

The Syriac Orthodox church of Our Lady (Template:Lang-syr`Idto d-Yoldat Aloho, Template:Lang-tr), was first constructed as a pagan temple in the 1st century BCE, and is still in use as a place of worship today.

Diyarbakır also has one of the region's most lively and dramatic street markets.

Always a centre of Kurdish nationalism,[citation needed] Diyarbakır became a stronghold of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) after the beginning of the guerilla war in southeastern Turkey in 1984. During this conflict, the population of the city grew dramatically as villagers from remote areas where fighting was serious left or were forced to leave for the relative security of the city. Diyarbakır was also one of the areas where the Kurdish Hezbollah was most active in the early to mid 1990s, with this group often targeting PKK activists and the city's tiny Christian community of Armenians and Syriacs.

After the PKK's cessation of hostilities, a large degree of normality returned to the city, with the Turkish government declaring a 15 year period of emergency rule over on 30 November, 2002. The local economy is slowly improving.

Notable residents

A mosque in Diyarbakır

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Distribution of Kurdish People — GlobalSecurity.org
  2. ^ Administrative Units of Contemporary Kurdistan
  3. ^ http://www.bianet.org/2006/11/01_eng/news88150.htm
  4. ^ http://www.unpo.org/article.php?id=4081
  5. ^ Kurdistan, Encyclopædia Britannica
  6. ^ Diyarbakir Sur Belediyesi: "Sur Municipality Survey of Field Research" cited in the daily newspaper Radikal
  7. ^ http://dsal.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/philologic/getobject.pl?c.2:1:7884.steingass
  8. ^ The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7
  9. ^ Theodor Mommsen History of Rome, The Establishment of the Military Monarchy
  10. ^ [1]
  11. ^ Le Monde, reprinted in The Guardian Weekly, gives 1.5 million figure 8/17/98
  12. ^ McDowall, p. 401, gives earlier figures.

References

  • Izady, Mehrdad (1992). The Kurds: A Concise Handbook. Taylor and Francis International Publishers. ISBN 0-8448-1727-9.
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