In Mardin, most of what there is to do is in the old town just below the citadel: the Great Mosque with its ribbed dome, medreses such as Zinciriye and Kasımiye, the old bedesten, houses dressed in carved stone, and two museums that explain the town before you walk it. Four kilometres away stands Deyrulzafaran, long a centre of the Syriac church, and thirty kilometres south-east are the walls, cisterns and rock tombs of Dara, an Eastern Roman garrison town. In the districts, Nusaybin has the monastery of Mor Yakup beside the Zeynel Abidin mosque, and Midyat has Mor Gabriel and a living filigree craft. Each sight below has its own guide on this site.
The old town: mosques and medreses
The Artuqid Great Mosque is the city's emblem. Of its two original minarets one survives, its base inscribed 1176 and its shaft rebuilt in eclectic style in 1888–89. The dome, ribbed outside, was the first of that kind and set a pattern for Mardin, and the plan, three aisles parallel to the mihrab wall broken by a dome before the mihrab, was widely copied nearby. Some Syriac writers say it was once a church. It is open to worshippers and visitors and keeps a hair of the Prophet. On 2. Cadde just above it is the Kayseriyye bedesten, the covered market, repaired continually since Artuqid times.
Zinciriye, just under the citadel, dates from 1385. Its founder, Melik Necmeddin İsa, fought Tamerlane's army and was afterwards held captive in the building, which is why it is also called the Sultan İsa Madrasa, and his shrine is inside; climb to its terrace for the view over Mardin. Kasımiye, begun by the Artuqids and halted by the Mongol attacks, was finished late in the fifteenth century by the Akkoyunlu sultan Kasım ibn Cihangir. In its courtyard, water running from fountain to pool is read as a human life from birth to death, and the classroom doors are just over a metre high, reportedly so that students bowed their heads before their teacher.
Hatuniye, or Sitti Radviyye, belongs to the last quarter of the twelfth century; it was founded by Kutbettin İlgazi's mother, who is buried in it, and beside its carved Artuqid mihrab a footprint of the Prophet is kept in a glass case. The Latifiye or Abdüllatif mosque of 1371, south of Cumhuriyet Meydanı, is one of the last Artuqid buildings in the town, with a well-kept two-coloured portal and late Seljuk woodwork in its doors, minbar and gallery. Along 1. Cadde, the Şeyh Çabuk and Melik Mahmut mosques show the crosswise prayer hall typical of Mardin, while Şehidiye, an early thirteenth-century medrese, has been altered almost beyond recognition.
Houses, water and the two museums
Mardin's houses carry as much of its character as its mosques. The Şatana house on 1. Cadde, opposite Şehidiye, was built in 1890 by the architect Lole and became the post office in 1950; the governorate ranks it among the best of the town's civil architecture. The house now used by the Gazipaşa primary school, begun in 1892 and opened in 1907 for a Syriac Orthodox family, has rooms each carved in its own pattern. Water gathered in rock tunnels under the castle fed a fountain in every quarter, and the fountains were graded by their water; the Ceviz fountain in Savurkapı, 100 metres south-east of the Artuklu caravanserai, is a sweet one. The Savurkapı bath, just south of Hatuniye, is placed around 1176-77 on the strength of the medrese's carved endowment deed.
Begin at the Sabancı Mardin City Museum, in a late nineteenth-century cavalry barracks on the old Cumhuriyet Meydanı. Upstairs it shows the trades the town depended on, from jewellery and copper to weaving, soap and stone carving, along with household and religious objects and gravestones of Mardin's several faiths; downstairs is the Dilek Sabancı Art Gallery. The Mardin Museum fills the Syriac Catholic patriarchate of 1895, a three-storey U-shaped building in the style of a Mardin house, with archaeology from the Bronze Age to the Ottomans and an ethnographic section of local silverwork and bitter-coffee sets.
Syriac Mardin and Deyrulzafaran
The Kırklar church of Mor Behnam and Saro, his sister, dates from the mid-sixth century; its ceiling rests on arches over twelve massive columns, and from 1293 the Syriac Orthodox patriarchate in Mardin ran the community's affairs from here.
Deyrulzafaran stands four kilometres from Mardin above the plain, on the site of a sun temple the Romans later turned into a fort. Saint Shleymun brought the bones of saints there and made it a monastery, Saint Hananyo rebuilt it from 793, and the saffron that grew around it gave it its present name from the fifteenth century. Its three storeys took their final shape in the eighteenth century. A centre of Syriac religious learning, it brought the region its first printing press in 1876, which turned out books in Syriac, Arabic, Turkish and Ottoman Turkish until 1969. It is still the seat of the metropolitan of Mardin, and Syriacs come to it from all over the world, as do travellers.
Dara
Dara, at Oğuz village thirty kilometres south-east of Mardin, was founded in 505 by the emperor Anastasius as a garrison facing the Sasanians on the Eastern Roman frontier. A wall four kilometres long circled it, with the citadel on a fifty-metre hill to the north, and inside lie the ruins of a church, palace, market, dungeon, arsenal and dam. Its huge cisterns, both water supply and defence, are the surprise, and west of the town rock-cut tombs open from deep valleys hewn into the bedrock. A turning off the Mardin–Nusaybin road leads there; much of the site is unexcavated.
Nusaybin and Beyazsu
In Nusaybin, the monastery of Mor Yakup and the Zeynel Abidin mosque share a courtyard. The monastery is named after Saint Jacob, who died in 421; a large church was built for him in 508–510, the broken arches of an earlier Persian-period temple can be traced round the building, and inscriptions list donors and the monks, priests and patriarchs who died there between 770 and 1364. The mosque complex is dated 1159 by its tomb inscription, and steps go down to the domed tomb of Molla Zeynelabidin and his sister Sitti Zeynep. On the road to Midyat, the Beyazsu valley is a patch of trees and clear water in dry country and the source of Mardin's drinking water, with fish restaurants seating diners over the stream in summer.
Midyat and Turabdin
Midyat lies in Turabdin, a region long regarded as the Syriac homeland. Mor Gabriel, or Deyrulumur, goes back to 397, when Mor Shmuel and Mor Shemun founded it, and it was enriched by gifts that included those of Roman emperors; fifth- and sixth-century parts survive, with Byzantine mosaics, domes and carved portals. Türkiye's tourism agency regards it as the oldest surviving Syriac Orthodox monastery. In the village known of old as Hah, the monastery of the Virgin has a small, richly decorated church, the Yoldoth Aloho, put on the UNESCO Tentative List in 2021 together with the Mor Sobo cathedral.
In Midyat town, the State Guest House of 1850, built by the Syriac Şabo family on the highest point, is now the town's emblem; it gained a third floor in 1930 and a stone balcony for a speech by Adnan Menderes that never took place, and Sıla and Hercai were among the series filmed there. At the Filigree Museum, run by the municipality, a workshop draws silver into wire and braids it into bracelets, necklaces and belts, a craft handed down by the town's Assyrian masters; the municipality calls it the first such museum in Türkiye and in the world.
Kızıltepe and Derik
At Kızıltepe, the Dunaysır bridge, Artuqid work in yellow stone from early in the thirteenth century, crosses the Zergan stream on five pointed arches and is still in use. Fifteen kilometres from Derik, Rabat Castle at Hisaraltı is a large rectangular fortress with fifteen bastions amid the ruins of a palace, a church and what the directorate believes was a Roman town. Gap Waterfall Nature Park, about four kilometres from Derik, has picnic areas and forest walks among oaks and olives.
