Batman, Turkey — Towns & Travel Guide

What is Batman known for?

The province sits over Turkey's oldest producing oil fields, and the Raman strike of 1940 turned a Tigris-side village into a refinery town within a single generation. Downstream lies Hasankeyf, a medieval town carved into the cliffs above the Tigris. Its bridges, mosques and rock-cut caves drew visitors for centuries.

Then the Ilısu Dam closed and the reservoir rose. By 2020 the old town lay underwater, and the Batman River, which gives the province its name, still runs down to join the Tigris.

Where is Batman?

Batman lies in the Southeastern Anatolia Region of Turkey, in the belt of Upper Mesopotamia that the Tigris has watered since antiquity. The land is a limestone plateau. It tilts down from the mountains of the north toward the river in the south, and the provincial capital stands on that plateau where the Batman River comes in from the hills to join the Tigris.

To the west, the Batman River draws the boundary with Diyarbakır Province. Siirt lies east and Mardin south. The Tigris itself runs along the province's southern edge before turning away into the plains below Hasankeyf. Height decides the character of each district.

The north rises into the Sason mountains, cut by gorges and fast streams, cooler and greener than anywhere else here. South of the city, low ridges such as Raman Dağı hide the oil that made Batman. Between them spread dry farmland and the six districts that make up the province: Batman, Beşiri, Gercüş, Hasankeyf, Kozluk and Sason.

Little of it is flat for long. The reservoir behind the Ilısu Dam has widened the Tigris into a lake along the southern boundary, drowning the gorge where old Hasankeyf stood.

What is Batman like?

Batman is a young city with an old hinterland, and the contrast runs through everything. The provincial capital barely existed before oil, so its wide grid, refinery housing and incomer families feel modern and unsettled. Around it, the countryside is deeply Kurdish.

Kurdish is the mother tongue of most of the province, spoken alongside Turkish in the markets and the villages, and the province is counted as part of the wider Kurdish region of the country's southeast. Music, dialect and kinship ties bind the rural districts more tightly than the oil town ever managed. The older culture belongs to the river.

For thousands of years people lived in the cliffs at Hasankeyf, cutting homes, chapels and bazaars into the rock above the Tigris. That heritage became a national argument when the Ilısu Dam threatened to drown it, and campaigners fought the flooding for years before the water won. A handful of monuments, among them the Zeynel Bey Tomb, were lifted whole and carried uphill to safety.

The rest is gone. What remains is a province that remembers an ancient Mesopotamian past while living an abruptly industrial present.

What is the history of Batman?

Batman holds two histories at very different depths. The deep one belongs to Hasankeyf, a fortress town on the Tigris that served as a seat of the Artuqid and later Ayyubid rulers, whose masons threw the great arch of the Old Bridge across the river in the twelfth century. The shallow one is the city itself.

A village called Iluh until oil was struck at Raman in 1940, it took city status in 1957 and gave its name to the province carved out of Siirt and Mardin in 1990.

What is the climate of Batman?

Summers here are brutal. Batman sits in the hot heart of Upper Mesopotamia, and July and August bake the plateau under some of the highest temperatures recorded anywhere in Turkey, with the Tigris valley shimmering and the fields going dry. Rain all but vanishes from late spring to autumn.

Winters flip the pattern: cool and wet, with frosty nights and occasional snow between December and March across the higher ground toward Sason.

How do you get to Batman?

Most people arrive by plane. Batman Airport, on the edge of the city, takes flights from Istanbul and Ankara, which is by far the quickest way into this corner of southeastern Turkey. The alternative is the road or the rails from Diyarbakır, the region's big city an hour or so to the west.

Trains on the Kurtalan line still stop at Batman. From the city, buses fan out to Hasankeyf and the reservoir, to the mountain towns of Sason and Kozluk, and on toward Siirt and Mardin.