Gaziantep, Turkey — Towns & Travel Guide

What is Gaziantep known for?

Food defines it. UNESCO named the city of Gaziantep a Creative City of Gastronomy, and the province turns pistachio orchards, spice markets, and centuries of cooking into baklava and kebabs traded far beyond southeastern Turkey. The past feeds the plate too.

Roman mosaics lifted from the flooded ruins of Zeugma fill one of the largest mosaic museums anywhere, and coppersmiths still hammer trays in the old bazaars of Gaziantep.

Where is Gaziantep?

Gaziantep Province sits inland, high on the limestone plateau of southeastern Turkey. Gaziantep Province is wholly landlocked. The land lies in the western corner of the Southeastern Anatolia Region, a broad tableland around eight hundred metres up, with the Syrian border closing it off to the south.

Ridges break the plain. Sof Dağı rises northwest of the city, and lower hills roll east toward the water that marks the province's far edge. The Euphrates draws that eastern boundary.

Streams like the Nizip and the Sacir run down off the plateau to join the great river, watering the pistachio orchards and wheat fields that cover much of the ground. Plains open out around İslahiye, Araban, and Oğuzeli, where the tableland softens into farmland. The city of Gaziantep holds the centre, the hub from which every district spreads.

It was on the Euphrates, in what is now Nizip district, that the Roman city of Zeugma once guarded a crossing of the river before the water rose over part of its ruins. This is a border province, its southern towns close to Aleppo across the line in Syria. The plateau sets the tone.

What is Gaziantep like?

Food is the language of Gaziantep. Turkish is the everyday language across the province, but the kitchen speaks loudest. UNESCO placed the city among its Creative Cities of Gastronomy for a cooking tradition of hundreds of distinct dishes, built on the pistachio, the local butter, and the long trade that once ran through here toward Aleppo.

Baklava is the emblem. Antep baklava carries a protected mark in Europe, layered with the green pistachios grown in the province's own orchards, and its makers guard their recipes like family names. Craft runs beside the cooking.

In the coppersmiths' bazaar below the castle, hammers still ring on trays and coffee pots the old way, a trade that has worked this market for generations. The stone city holds the rest. Courtyard mansions, domed hammams, and the covered markets of the Bey neighbourhood keep the shape of an Ottoman trading town, while the Roman mosaics saved from Zeugma give the province a second, older face.

People come to eat. They stay for the workshops, the museums, and the markets that fill the streets of Gaziantep and its old quarters.

What is the history of Gaziantep?

Gaziantep grew from ancient Antep, a town on the caravan roads of northern Syria's borderlands. The ground is old. Nearby Zeugma guarded a Euphrates crossing for the Romans, and settlement on this plateau reaches back through Hittite and Byzantine hands to the earliest towns of the region.

The modern name is young. Turkey's parliament added the honorific Gazi, meaning war hero, in 1921, after the town's long resistance to a French siege during the Turkish War of Independence.

What is the climate of Gaziantep?

Gaziantep has a hot, dry summer and a cool, wet winter, sharpened by its height on the plateau. Summers bake. Rainless months run from late spring deep into autumn, leaving the pistachio country parched under a hard sun.

Winters turn cold. The province sits well above the coast, catching frost and snow that the Mediterranean shore never sees, and most of the year's rain falls in those cooler months.

How do you get to Gaziantep?

Air is how most arrive in Gaziantep. Gaziantep Oğuzeli Airport lies southwest of the city and links the province to İstanbul, Ankara, and cities abroad, the main door into this corner of southeastern Turkey. Roads carry the rest.

Highways climb up from the Mediterranean coast and run east across the plateau toward the Euphrates, while long-distance coaches and a rail line tie Gaziantep to the cities of Anatolia. The Syrian border sits close to the south.