Van to Diyarbakir

Departure from Van and heading to Diyarbakir. The military checkpoints on the road became even more frequent (Diyarbakir is supposedly the center of the Kurdish separatist movement).

The guidebooks call the city (tongue in cheek), the Paris of the East and compare the city walls to the Great Wall of China. Not quite…. but the walled city is quite amazing. The city itself is four main gates with two main roads intersecting at the center. The rest of the road plan is a maze of narrow, twisting, mostly unmarked alleys.

We decided quickly to employ the services of our bellboy at the hotel (a converted caravanserai). A good move- the city is majority Kurdish and was filled with street urchins begging for money (and occasionally throwing stones). We would have lasted about 5 minutes without our guide. All of the children know two phrases, “Hello” and “What is your name?”.

Our guide walked us through the slums south of the Citadel and it was quite an education. Thousands of children and their mothers with no men. We found the men in the teahouses inside the city walls playing cards and drinking tea. Our guide explained to us that the government has been very unfair to the Kurds- giving them no programs or support. Most of the families have 8 or more children and they’re lucky if even one of them can go to school. The future looks very bleak- nothing but begging and religion in their future. We stopped by a typical Diyarbakir house. They are made of black basalt and divided into summer and winter quarters with an inner courtyard. We made a few other stops at an old Armenian church in ruins and the Meryem Ana Kilisesi (Church of the Virgin Mary), still in use by Syrian Christians. Our guide walked us up on the city walls for a view of the entire area and then invited us to his house in New Town. He was a charming Kurdish boy of 25 who was very intrigued with the idea of marrying a European (or American) girl. We offered him Stephanie and he was very keen on the idea.

After an afternoon walking the streets with the Kurdish hoards, we decided that it was a hotel evening. The call to prayer was chilling- the city has more mosques per square meter than any city in Turkey- with all the mosques going at once, it sounded like a beehive. We bought a few beers (the hotel was charging 1.5-M lire- 4 times what we had been paying) and chilled our wine, ordered a chicken shish and watched the show (literally) at the hotel. The hotel was filled with 200 Turks for dinner and an evening of Kurdish folk dancing.