Diyarbakır Archaeology Museum

About this place

The oldest things in these cases predate the pyramids by roughly seven thousand years: incised stone bowls and tools from Körtik Tepe, one of the earliest settled villages anywhere, dating to around the tenth millennium BC, alongside finds from Çayönü, a site that holds some of the earliest known evidence for wheat farming and pig domestication. That is where the story starts, and it then runs in strict chronological order through the Assyrians, Roman Amida, the Marwanids and Artuqids to the Ottomans, inside the government house that Governor Sırrı Pasha built in 1889. The museum is not one building but a campus inside the İçkale, the inner citadel on the north-eastern corner of the old city, where late-Ottoman public buildings were restored and given new jobs: the gendarmerie barracks became a thematic gallery, the church of St George, whose architecture goes back to the third century, an art gallery, the inspectorate that Atatürk used as his headquarters in 1917 an Atatürk museum, the Army Corps building of 1902 a café. A single three-euro ticket opens the lot, which makes it one of the cheapest state museums in Turkey. One plain warning: the Ministry of Culture currently lists the thematic hall as temporarily closed, so the chronological hall is what you will actually see, and it fills a focused hour. What makes the trip worth more than the museum alone is what surrounds it. A few steps away stands the Hz. Süleyman Mosque, named after Süleyman son of Khalid ibn al-Walid and holding, by local tradition, the tombs of twenty-seven Companions of the Prophet who fell in the conquest of Amida in 639, a place of pilgrimage for the whole region, and from the citadel walls you get the view Diyarbakır is famous for: the green Hevsel Gardens and the Tigris winding beneath them, the landscape that was inscribed with the walls on the UNESCO World Heritage list. Treat the museum as one stop on a citadel walk, not a destination in itself. Practically: labels are in Turkish and English only, and the halls are air-conditioned, which matters in a Diyarbakır summer that often passes forty degrees in July and August, so go inside at midday and leave the walls for late afternoon. The campus paths are paved and wide enough for pushchairs, with stairs up to the first floor of the exhibition hall. Children over about eight get half an hour out of the stone tools and pottery; younger ones will prefer the ramparts. Spring and autumn are the comfortable seasons for the whole city.