A city situated on the top of a hill, it is known for its fascinating architecture consisting of heavily decorated stonework cascading from the hilltop, although occasionally pierced by new, ugly construction. Syriac is a Semitic language directly related to the native tongue of Jesus Christ, Aramaic. Syriac Orthodoxy was established after the first division in Christianity in , much earlier than the Great Schism of 11th century between the churches of Rome and Constantinople.
While the Syriac population in Mardin dwindled due to emigration nowadays Assyrians are more numerous in Sweden than in all of Turkey , they are still very much present in the city, along with more or less all other regional cultures, including Turks, Kurds, and Arabs.
Mardin served as the capital of Turkic Artuqid dynasty between 12th and 15th centuries, which resulted in much of the Islamic heritage madrasah s and mosques visible in the city today. It was effectively closed to tourism throughout the s by the on-going Turkey-PKK conflict in the surrounding countryside, and was omitted from most of the guidebooks to the area.
Mardin has started to catch up with tourism, but don't expect hordes of package tourists. It rewards the intrepid traveller who took the effort to go there with a sense of discovery, along with plenty of beautiful architecture and vistas. The main street of old city, which traverses the town from one end to another through its centre, is called 1. Cadde or Cumhuriyet Caddesi for part of its route.
At the eastern end of the old town, it makes a sharp U-turn, and runs along the entire southern edge of city, making another U-turn at the western end of the town and thus completing a loop. While the maps and aerial photos of old city may look like a labyrinth, it is pretty hard to get lost in narrow alleysβdepending on which side of main drag you are on, take downhill or uphill alleys you will come across one by one in a succession, and within 15 minutes at most, you will be back at main street.
