The Hilar caves lie within the bounds of the village of Hilar, six kilometres south-west of the Ergani district of Diyarbakır.
The Hilar rocks are among the oldest cave settlements in Anatolia. Between AD 100 and 325 they were used as rock tombs, and between their historic fabric and the lie of the land they hold both natural beauty and archaeological value.
The rock formations here were shaped by the weathering of limestone across and along its beds. What adds to the value of the place is how well those natural forms agree with the archaeological remains, and its relation to Çayönü, the mound lying five hundred metres to the north.
What is known about the graves comes from two rounds of digging. The first excavation at Hilar was made by the Çayönü team in 1979. Then, under a project for protecting Çayönü Tepesi and the Hilar caves and opening them to visitors, work went on in the necropolis between 2006 and 2010; besides the grave chambers already known, it found further chambers, graves cut as niches in the rock and trough graves hollowed out of it, some of them carrying reliefs on their fronts. The caves belong to late antiquity, and the directorate calls them among the best surviving examples in the region of the monumental grave chambers of their period.
The site's status is recent. The Diyarbakır museum directorate began fresh work in 2023 and 2024 to have the ground registered as an archaeological site, and in 2024 it was registered under the name Hilar Mağaraları Örenyeri — the first such site in Diyarbakır. Since you are here, the excavation area of Çayönü Tepesi lies five hundred metres to the north: scientific digging has gone on there since 1964, and it is taken to be one of the important settlements of the region, with occupation accepted as unbroken from the Pre-Pottery Neolithic to the Middle Ages.
When to go
- Climate
- Across Diyarbakır as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from 1.8 °C in January to 31 °C in July; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in May and October; rainfall is heaviest in December (70 mm) and lightest in August (1 mm). Long-term means for 1929-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
