Amed (Diyarbakır)

Amed's roots reach into the fifth millennium BC, when the Hurrians built the first settlement on the bank of the Tigris. Assyrian texts of the ninth century BC name it Amidu, from which the modern Kurdish name comes. It was a capital of the Mitanni kingdom and an important political centre, fortified in turn by the Arameans and the Romans, who called it Amida and built its first ramparts. In the fourth century AD the emperor Constantius II built the great black basalt wall that is still its hallmark — five and a half kilometres long, pierced by four monumental gates, and counted among the greatest works of Roman military architecture in the East. Amed fell to Sassanid Persia, then to Islam after the seventh-century conquest, and was given to the Diyar Bakr province — 'the abode of the Banu Bakr tribe' — from which its modern Turkish name comes. Amed knew its medieval golden age under the Artuqids of the twelfth century, who built its great mosque modelled on the Umayyad Mosque of Damascus and founded two great madrasas in the city. The traveller Yaqut al-Hamawi visited and called Amed 'the city with the finest walls in all the world'. In the following centuries it was ruled by the Kurdish Marwanids, then the Kurdish Ayyubids, then the Kurdish Dulqadirids — but its population remained continuously Kurdish. It entered the Ottoman empire in 1515 under Sultan Selim I and remained a vilayet for four centuries. From here came the great Kurdish religious scholars, among them Sheikh Said Piran, who led the 1925 revolt against the new Kemalist policies and was hanged in Amed. The twentieth century saw heavy state repression of the Kurds, and Amed was the centre of the youth uprisings of the 1980s against the ban on the Kurdish language. Today Amed is the capital of 1.7 million Kurds — the largest urban Kurdish concentration in Turkey. Its streets pulse with popular life, full of cafés, restaurants and Kurdish poetry evenings. The Great Mosque, the Mela Faxir mosque, the Syriac Church of the Virgin, and the Hewsel gardens overlooking the Tigris are all stops for the visitor. The basalt walls were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2015. Here history and the present meet in one of the politically and spiritually most weighty Kurdish cities.