In Adana itself, start at the river. The Stone Bridge, Taşköprü, has crossed the Seyhan since Roman times, and the Sabancı Central Mosque stands on its west bank. Behind them lies the old town of the Ramazanoğlu emirs, with its Great Mosque, the Yağ Mosque and a clock tower, and in a converted textile mill the Adana Museum. Out in the province are the ruins of Anavarza under their castle rock, Misis on the Ceyhan, the old port of Yumurtalık with its lagoon, and to the north the Kapıkaya canyon and the cool plateaus of the Taurus.
On the Seyhan: Taşköprü and the Sabancı Mosque
The bridge links the Seyhan and Yüreğir districts and is the city's best-known emblem. An inscription now kept in the archaeological museum names its builder, an architect called Auxentios, and dates it to the Roman imperial period, some seventeen hundred years ago; the provincial directorate goes further: in its words, no older bridge anywhere is still carrying people across. Since a repair in 2006 no cars cross it, so it is a walk: 319 metres from bank to bank, with fourteen of its twenty-one round arches still showing.
The Sabancı Central Mosque, opened in 1998 in the Reşatbey quarter south of Merkez Park, is, by the directorate's account, the biggest mosque not only in Türkiye but in the whole Middle East. Necip Dinç designed it in the classical Ottoman manner: from outside it recalls the Sultan Ahmet Mosque, while the plan and the interior follow the Selimiye. A dome thirty-two metres wide stands on nine great piers, and the prayer space takes twenty thousand people.
Near Taşköprü, Tepebağ is the oldest settlement in the city. Its streets of houses 100 to 150 years old form a registered conservation area. One small find from here, a Middle Kingdom figurine of a lady called Sitsnefru, is now shown in New York, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The old town of the Ramazanoğulları
The Great Mosque, Ulu Cami, was begun by Halil Bey of the Ramazanoğulları and completed by his son Piri Mehmet Paşa in 1541. Look for the black and white marble of the façades, the dome with two carved serpents above the western door, and above all the tiles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries on the qibla wall. The Ramazanoğlu mansion of 1495 stands nearby, its selamlık and haremlik both surviving, with a pool terrace upstairs.
The Yağ Mosque is two buildings made into one. Halil Bey had the Armenian church of Surp Hagop turned into a mosque in 1501, and when it grew too small Piri Mehmet Paşa built a larger mosque against it; inside, the half-cylindrical eastern part is the old church. The name, the oil mosque, comes from a nineteenth-century market where oil was sold before its door. The tiny domed Akça Mescit, sixty metres from the Great Mosque, may predate it: two carved birds once above its door are read as a date, though only faint traces remain.
The Great Clock Tower of 1882 rises 32 metres in cut stone. In Tepebağ the Bebekli Kilise, a Catholic church of the 1880s, takes its name from the bronze Virgin on its roof, which looks like a baby from the street.
The museums
The Adana Museum complex occupies the Milli Mensucat mill in Döşeme, a works founded in 1906, and the archaeological museum opened there on 18 May 2017. Founded in 1924, it is among the ten oldest museums in the country. Eight halls lead from prehistory to the present, mostly in stone; the museum points to the storm god Tarhunda, a stele in Anatolian hieroglyphs, a bronze figure pulled from the sea and the Achilles sarcophagus.
The Greek church of 1845 that once housed the collection is now the Kuruköprü Monument Museum. The Atatürk House Museum in Kayalıbağ is the konak where Atatürk and Latife Hanım stayed on 15 March 1923. Also in Kayalıbağ, the Cinema Museum, opened in 2011 in an old Adana house, hangs posters of films that had at least one Adana name behind them, and is linked with the Golden Boll festival.
East of the city: Misis, Anavarza and Kozan
Misis, on the Ceyhan twenty-seven kilometres out, keeps a stone bridge of nine arches, mosaics of the fourth century AD and a caravanserai of 1542. On the old road towards Ceyhan, Sirkeli Höyük has a rock relief of the Hittite king Muvattali, and south-east of Ceyhan the fortress-like Kurtkulağı caravanserai served the caravan road to Aleppo.
Anavarza, in Dilekkaya 28 kilometres south of Kozan, has been on UNESCO's Tentative List since 2014. Expect a whole Roman city: a colonnaded street, a theatre, a stadium, rock tombs, a Thetis mosaic and the Ala Gate, a triumphal arch with three openings, all overlooked by a castle the provincial directorate calls the largest in Çukurova. Dioscorides lived here and the poet Oppian was born here. In Kozan, the city museum in the old town hall shows Roman mosaics and coins linked to Anavarza.
The coast: Yumurtalık and Karataş
Yumurtalık was Aegeae in antiquity and Ayas in the Middle Ages, a port Marco Polo reached in 1269. What remains is a land castle rebuilt again and again, the island fortress of Kız Kalesi, the Süleyman watchtower and a quay named after Polo. Between Yumurtalık and Karataş lies the Yumurtalık lagoon, a Ramsar site since 2005. At Karataş, forty-nine kilometres from the city, are the ancient city of Magarsus with its temples of Athena, the Akyatan bird sanctuary where loggerhead and green turtles occur, and a shoreline nature park with camping.
North into the Taurus: canyons, bridges and plateaus
The Kapıkaya canyon, in Karaisalı district, is about two hundred metres deep with the Çakıt stream running along its floor; a 7,250-metre walking route goes through it, partly railed, and it appeals to walkers, climbers and photographers. In the same district stand the Varda Bridge, a steel railway viaduct built by Germans in 1912 for the Baghdad line, and Yerköprü, a picnic ground that turns green in spring. Belemedik Nature Park near Pozantı has wild goats, and Obruk Waterfall near Saimbeyli shelters the endemic Saimbeyli blue butterfly.
Because the plain is so hot in summer, people of the region have long moved up to the plateaus for the season. Çatak near Saimbeyli has plane trees with arbours built into their branches, Horzum on the Kozan road keeps timber houses, and on the Göksu through Feke agencies now and then run rafting and canoeing trips. In Aladağ, the Bığbığ ivy is put at 4,000 years old.
