Diyarbakır's city walls, built by Constantius II and extended by Valentinian I between 367 and 375, stretch almost unbroken for about 6 kilometres.
The area around Diyarbakır has been inhabited by humans from the Stone Age with tools from that period having been discovered in the nearby Hilar cave complex. The pre-pottery neolithic B settlement of Çayönü dates to over 10,000 years ago and its excavated remains are on display at the Diyarbakır Museum. Another important site is the Girikihaciyan Tumulus in Eğil.[8]
Late Bronze
The first major civilization to establish themselves in the region of what is now Diyarbakır were the Hurrian kingdom of the Mitanni. The city was first mentioned by Assyrian texts as the capital of a Semitic kingdom.
Syriac Christianity took hold in the region between the 1st and 4th centuries AD, particularly amongst the Assyrians of the city. The earliest documented bishop of Amida was Simeon of the Assyrian Church of the East, who took part in the First Council of Nicaea in 325, on behalf of the Assyrians. In the next century, Saint Acacius of Amida (who died in 425, and is included in the Roman Martyrology[10]) was noted for having sold the church's gold and silver vessels to ransom and assist Persian prisoners of war.
The names of several of the successors of Acacius are known, but their orthodoxy is unclear. The last whose orthodoxy is certain is Cyriacus, a participant in the Second Council of Constantinople (553). Many bishops of the Byzantine Empire fled in the face of the Persian invasion of the early 7th century, with a resultant spread of the Jacobite Church. Michael the Syrian gives a list of Jacobite bishops of Amida down to the 13th century.[13][14][15]
Inside the St. Giragos Armenian Church photographed after its restoration, 2012. In March 2016, the Turkish government confiscated this and several other churches in Sur after the Siege of Sur.
At some stage, Amida became a see of the Armenian Church. The bishops who held the see in 1650 and 1681 were in full communion with the Holy See, and in 1727 Peter Derboghossian sent his profession of faith to Rome. He was succeeded by two more bishops of the Armenian Catholic Church, Eugenius and Ioannes of Smyrna, the latter of whom died in Constantinople in 1785. After a long vacancy, three more bishops followed. The diocese had some 5,000 Armenian Catholics in 1903,[16] but it lost most of its population in the 1915 Armenian genocide. The last diocesan bishop of the see, Andreas Elias Celebian, was killed with some 600 of his flock in the summer of 1915.[17][18][19][20]
An eparchy for the local members of the Syriac Catholic Church was established in 1862. Ignatius Philip I Arkus, who was its first bishop, was elected patriarch in 1866, and kept the governance of the see of Amida, which he exercised through a patriarchal vicar. The eparchy was united to that of Mardin in 1888. Persecution of Christians in the Ottoman Empire during the First World War brought an end to the existence of both these Syrian residential sees.[17][18][21][22]
As of 2015, there are two Chaldean churches and three Armenian churches in at least periodic operation. Three other churches are in ruins, all Armenian: one in Sur, Diyarbakır, one in the citadel that is now part of a museum complex, and one in another part of the city.
The diocese of Amida, in 1650, was suppressed in 1972 and immediately nominally restored as Armenian Catholic (Armenian Rite and language) titular bishopric of the lowest (episcopal) rank, Amida of the Armenians.
So far, it has had the following incumbents, of the fitting episcopal rank with an archiepiscopal exception:
Titular Archbishop Lévon Boghos Zékiyan (21 May 2014 – 21 March 2015), as Apostolic Administratorsede plena of Istanbul of the Armenians (Turkey) (21 May 2014 – 21 March 2015), later succeeded as Archeparch (Archbishop) of Istanbul of the Armenians (21 March 2015.03.21 – present) and President of Episcopal Conference of Turkey (April 2015 – present)
In 639, the city was subjected to the Muslim conquests, and the religion of Islam was introduced. The city passed under Umayyad and then Abbasid control, but with the progressive fragmentation of the Abbasid Caliphate from the late 9th century, it periodically came under the rule of autonomous dynasties. Isa ibn al-Shaykh al-Shaybani and his descendants ruled the city and the wider Diyar Bakr province from 871 until 899, when Caliph al-Mu'tadid restored Abbasid control, but the area soon passed to another local dynasty, the Hamdanids. The latter were displaced by the Buyids in 978, who were in turn followed by the Marwanids in 983. The Marwanids ruled until 1085, when the Seljuks took the city from them. It came under the rule of the Mardin branch of the Oghuz Turks, and then the Anatolian beylik of the Artuqids. The city came under the Ayyubid Sultanate in 1183, which ruled the city until it was overrun by the Mongols in 1260. For a time the city was ruled by the competing Turkic federations of the Kara Koyunlu (the Black Sheep) and then the Aq Qoyunlu until the rise of the Persian Safavids, who took over the city and the wider region in the 16th century.
This 17th-century map detail shows Diyarbakır (west at top, from a 17th-century Ottoman map of the Tigris-Euphrates river system that may have been created by Evliya Çelebi)
A typical example of Diyarbakır's historic architectural style, with masonry tiles built of the city's indigenous type of dark basalt stone.
Following their victory, the Ottomans established the Diyarbekir Eyalet with its administrative centre in Diyarbakır. The Eyalet of Diyarbakır corresponded to today's Turkish Kurdistan, 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. The city was an important military base for controlling the region and at the same time a thriving city noted for its craftsmen, producing glass and metalwork. For example, the doors of Rumi's tomb in Konya were made in Diyarbakır, as were the gold and silver decorated doors of the tomb of Ebu Hanife in Baghdad. Ottoman rule was confirmed by the 1555 Peace of Amasya which followed the Ottoman–Safavid War (1532–1555). The Safavid Shah Abbas I recaptured the city for two brief periods, during the Ottoman–Safavid War (1603–18), and once again in 1623–1624, during the Ottoman–Safavid War (1623–1639).[25]
Concerned with independent-mindedness of the Kurdish principalities, the Ottomans sought to curb their influence and bring them under the control of the central government in Constantinople. However, removal from power of these hereditary principalities led to more instability in the region from the 1840s onwards. In their place, sufi sheiks and religious orders rose to prominence and spread their influence throughout the region. One of the prominent Sufi leaders was Shaikh Ubaidalla Nahri, who began a revolt in the region between Lakes Van and Urmia. The area under his control covered both Ottoman and Qajar territories. Shaikh Ubaidalla is regarded as one of the earliest proponents of Kurdish nationalism. In a letter to a British Vice-Consul, he declared: "The Kurdish nation is a people apart... we want our affairs to be in our hands."
Diyarbakır grew from a population of 30,000 in the 1930s to 65,000 by 1956, to 140,000 by 1970, to 400,000 by 1990,[33] and eventually swelled to about 1.5 million by 1997.[34]
The American-Turkish Pirinçlik Air Force Base, near Diyarbakır, was operational from 1956 to 1997.
Many bombings were perpetrated in city during the conflict targeting both military targets and civilians. On 18 February 2016, a roadside bomb placed by PKK killed 6 soldiers and injured another.[41] On 10 May 2016, a bombing perperated by PKK in city killed 3 people while injuring 45 others, including 33 civilians.[42] On 12 May 2016, a truck bombing in Dürümlü hamlet of city killed 16 people and injured 23 others, all civilians.[43][44][45] On 4 November 2016 a bombing near a police building in city killed 2 policemen and 9 civilians while injuring 100 others, both Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and the Kurdistan Freedom Hawks claimed responsibility.[46][47]
A 2018 report by Arkeologlar Derneği İstanbul found that, since 2015, 72% of the city's historic Sur district had been destroyed through demolition and redevelopment, and that laws designed to protect historic monuments had been ignored. They found that the city's "urban regeneration" policy was one of demolition and redevelopment rather than one of repairing cultural assets damaged during the recent civil conflict, and because of that many registered historic buildings had been completely destroyed. The extent of the loss of non-registered historic structures is unknown because any historic building fragments revealed during the demolition of modern structures were also demolished.[48]
^Bryce, Trevor (2009) The Routledge Handbook of the Peoples and Places of Ancient Western Asia p. 38
^Western Armenian pronunciation: Dikranagerd; Hovannisian, Richard G. (2006). Armenian Tigranakert/Diarbekir and Edessa/Urfa. Costa Mesa, California: Mazda Publishers. p. 2. ISBN978-1-56859-153-7. The city that later generations of Armenians would call Dikranagerd was actually ancient Amid or Amida (now Diyarbekir or Diyarbakır), a great walled city with seventy-two towers...
^Edwards, Robert W. (2016). "Diyarbakır". In Paul Corby Finney (ed.). The Eerdmans Encyclopedia of Early Christian Art and Archaeology. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing. p. 115. ISBN978-0-8028-9016-0.
^Bayir, Derya (2016-04-22). Minorities and Nationalism in Turkish Law. Routledge. pp. 139–141. ISBN978-1-317-09579-8.
^Fleet, Kate; Kunt, I. Metin; Kasaba, Reşat; Faroqhi, Suraiya (2008-04-17). The Cambridge History of Turkey. Cambridge University Press. p. 343. ISBN978-0-521-62096-3.
^ abKirişci, Kemal (June 1998). "Turkey". In Janie Hampton (ed.). Internally Displaced People: A Global Survey. London: Earthscan Publications Ltd. pp. 198, 199.