Batman is a province of south-eastern Anatolia, on the Tigris, and its city of the same name is the base for seeing it. The biggest group of sights is at Hasankeyf, the old rock-castle town above the river, where the Ilısu dam has changed the ground: some monuments now stand in a new cultural park and the finds sit in a purpose-built museum. In the city itself is the Batman Museum; out in the districts are the old mosques and castles of Kozluk, the mountain castles of Sason, the Syriac monastery of Mor Kiryakus in Beşiri, and the shrine of Seyyid Bilal at Gercüş. Each place below has its own guide on this site.
Batman city and its surroundings
Start at the Mehmet Cabir Alper Archaeological Museum, also known as the Batman Museum. Its three galleries, given to the Palaeolithic and Neolithic, to Ilısu and to Hasankeyf, show some 500 pieces, many from the seven rescue digs it runs at mounds in Batman and Siirt that the dam was going to flood. The museum's own pick is a set of gaming stones from Başur Höyük; near them stand a standing stone from Gusir Höyük and a figure of the god Bes found at Hasankeyf. In the garden, the Museum Park rebuilds houses and burial customs from the excavated mounds, and archaeologists show visitors how a dig works. The museum believes no other in Türkiye had tried this before.
Seven kilometres from the centre, the ten-arched railway bridge, also called the Zilek bridge, crosses the Batman stream on the crossing towards Diyarbakır. It went up between 1939 and 1944 to bring the state railway to Batman, with room for people and animals besides the trains, and the provincial directorate calls it an engineering marvel for its day.
Fifty kilometres north of the centre, beside the Sason Çayı, which feeds the Tigris, is Hallan Çemi, a low mound found in 1990 during survey work ahead of the Batman Dam. The dates put forward for it, roughly 11,700 to 11,270 years ago, would make it the oldest settlement known in Anatolia. Its people were hunter-gatherers who had settled down: there was no farming, but the pig was already on its way to being domesticated.
Hasankeyf: the town on the Tigris
Hasankeyf is 37 kilometres from Batman on the road to Midyat. The name grew out of Hısnıkeyfa, the rock fortress, and the place earned it: a castle carved from a single mass of rock stands two hundred metres above the Tigris. It sat on a land and river route between Diyarbakır and Cizre, which brought it trade and armies in turn. Its best centuries came between the twelfth and the sixteenth, as the capital of the Artuqids and then the Ayyubids; the Ottomans took it in 1515. On the way up to the castle, stepped paths pass inscriptions set into the walls, and two stairways, one open and one hidden, each of two hundred steps, run down to the river.
Inside the castle area, the Great Mosque was raised in 1325 by the Ayyubids over the remains of a church; it is the largest of the mosques there, with plaster decoration inside, a carved stone mihrab and, under the courtyard, a cistern that holds thousands of tonnes. Of the Small Palace only part of one iwan still stands, on a slope over the town. North of the citadel, the Great Palace covers about 14,000 square metres. With no inscription, its builder and date are unknown; it is thought to have begun as a Roman garrison and been rebuilt as a palace in the Artuqid and Ayyubid years.
What the Ilısu dam changed at Hasankeyf
Before you go, know this: Hasankeyf mound now lies under the reservoir of the Ilısu dam. Rescue digs before the flooding turned up enough to count it among the oldest and most important neolithic settlements in Anatolia. Between 2017 and 2019 several of the main monuments were taken down and set up again in the new Hasankeyf Cultural Park, among them the tomb of Zeynel Bey, the Artuqid bath, the zawiya of Imam Abdullah, the Kızlar mosque, the Orta Kapı and the mosques of Süleyman Han and Er-Rızk.
The tomb of Zeynel Bey was put up for Zeynel Bey, whose father was Uzun Hasan of the Akkoyunlu, after he was killed at Otlukbeli on 11 August 1473; Pir Hasan, son of Abdurrahman, was its architect. Its cylindrical body is the only one of its kind, wrapped in three bands of tiles that spell the names Allah, Muhammed and Ali, and since 2017 it stands two kilometres from where it was built. The zawiya gathers around the tomb of Imam Abdullah, whom local people count among the Prophet's descendants; it was first built in the twelfth century under the Artuqids, and an inscription over the door dates a repair to 1478.
The Hasankeyf Museum, in the new settlement, was built to hold the finds of those rescue digs. Its two-storey hall is split into fourteen rooms, strongest on the Ayyubid and Artuqid periods, with coins, seals, tablets and a portal among the exhibits. One room is a science centre showing the inventions of El-Cezerî, a man of this region whose life ran from 1136 to 1206. Two kilometres north of Üçyol village, also in Hasankeyf district, the undated Mor Aho monastery stands alone among fields.
Kozluk: mosques, castles and the Malabadi park
Kozluk was once called Hezo, and the two old mosques in its centre are dated by their inscriptions. Hızır Bey Camii, which the provincial directorate calls the district's largest mosque, carries the date 1512 and the name of its builder, Hızır Bey, bey of Sason and Hezo. İbrahim Bey Camii dates from 1705; its minaret rises from a five-sided base and holds two separate stairs, one of a hundred steps and one of ninety-nine.
On a rocky hill in the Kale quarter, the much-ruined Kozluk castle, or Hezo, began in AD 416 as a Persian religious centre and later controlled the Silk Road traffic through the area. Kandil castle, six kilometres north-west of the town on the old road to Sason, was built by the Byzantines early in the fourth century to bar the way into the Erzen region. Malabadi Nature Park, 32 kilometres from Batman beside the historic Malabadi bridge, became a protected park on 13 March 2019 over 95.95 hectares; the directorate calls it the first nature park in Batman, and the Mount Tabor oak is its main tree.
Sason: three castles in the mountains
For the three castles around Sason, the provincial directorate reads their past from the ground they stand on. Beksi, seven kilometres north-west of the town on the southern slope of Meydanok mountain, sits in such a strong position that the directorate takes it as never captured; Pertükân, four kilometres south-west and easy to reach, it supposes changed hands many times, judging by the breaches in its walls. Bozikân, 25 kilometres north at Kaleyolu village, is given to the Byzantine period and said to have watched over this stretch of the silk road.
Beşiri and Gercüş: a monastery, a bridge and a shrine
At Ayrancı village in Beşiri, on the eastern slope of Kira Dağı above the northern Mesopotamian plain, the Mor Kiryakus monastery has stood since the fifth century, one of the first founded in Turabdin by monks who came from Aleppo. It covers 2,500 square metres around two courtyards ringed with arches, and the patriarch's room has a ceiling carved as an eight-lobed stone dome with starred crosses. Also in Beşiri, the ruined Memikan bridge once carried the caravan road across the Garzan stream towards Hasankeyf.
In Gercüş district, the village of Vergili, also called Becirman, keeps the tomb of Seyyid Bilal, whose inscription gives his life as 1132 to 1212. In the provincial directorate's words, no place in south-eastern Anatolia draws more faith tourism, and each September, in its second week, commemoration days bring visitors from across Türkiye.
