Hevsel Gardens

About this place

Some twenty-nine centuries ago an Assyrian king punished a rebellious city by cutting down its orchards, and the orchards are still here. Some 700 hectares of fruit trees, vegetable plots and poplar groves step down five terraces from the foot of the basalt cliff below Diyarbakır's south-eastern ramparts to the bank of the Tigris, watered by springs that rise where the rock meets the soil. They fed the city under Rome, Byzantium, the Abbasids and the Ottomans, and local families still farm them, which is why UNESCO inscribed them with the fortress in 2015 as a living cultural landscape rather than a monument. Be clear about what that means: this is not a park with paved paths, benches and fountains. It is working farmland, with no gate, no ticket and no opening hours. A third of it is poplar; the rest is cabbage, spinach, tomatoes, peaches, apricots, figs and mulberries depending on the month, threaded with dirt tracks and irrigation channels. The right way to see it starts from above, on Keçi Burcu and the southern walls or on the glass terrace of the İçkale citadel, where a broad sweep of green runs out to the silver line of the river and the mountains beyond. Then, if you have the inclination and the footwear, drop down from Mardin Gate through the plots to the Ten-Arched Bridge over the Tigris: roughly 3 km, an easy descent and a climb back that bites in the heat. Season decides everything. From April to June the gardens are at their fullest green and shelter more than 180 species of resident and migrating birds, so you will share the tracks with birdwatchers and long lenses. Autumn turns the poplars gold. In July and August, when Gulf families are in Turkey, Diyarbakır regularly nudges 40°C and a midday walk through the fields is a penance, not an outing; take the view from the walls early in the morning or towards sunset instead. In winter the tracks turn to mud. With children, the walls and the terrace are enough and genuinely fun; the field track is no place for a pushchair and calls for water, a hat and a little care beside the channels. Allow an hour for the view alone, two if you walk to the bridge and back. If you have time for only one thing in Diyarbakır, make it the walls themselves, but the walls without Hevsel beneath them lose half their point.