My first solo visit to Mardin was in 1994 when the troubles in the East were at their height with checkpoints everywhere and curfews on some of the surrounding roads.
Inevitably tourists traveling in groups were pretty thin on the ground, those traveling alone conspicuous by their absence. There was a perfectly decent hotel in the new town but of course I had my heart set on staying in old Mardin, the lovely area made up of terraces of honey-colored houses accessed via secretive alleyways that had so reminded me of old Jerusalem on a previous visit.
Up in old Mardin there were only two “hotels” in business. The more conspicuous of the two was the Bayraktar, a '60s-style high-rise block so ugly it might as well have been sticking two fingers up at the glorious 19th-century building housing the museum immediately across the road. As I walked towards the Bayraktar my heart was already sinking. It's never a good sign when every other letter of a hotel's name has fallen off the sign and yet management has not seen fit to replace them, so it came as little surprise to find reception staffed by a man whose bottle-thick glasses were held together with scotch and who jumped with shock when I walked up to him.
Was there a vacant room? I asked. The man looked as if he wanted to cry but one behind the other we mounted four flights of stairs (it goes without saying that the lift was out of action) and he threw open a door to reveal a room in which every piece of wiring was hanging out of the wall and the bathroom merited a starring role in a horror movie. I was just about to make my apologies and scuttle back to the safety of the new town when something made me walk across to the window and look out. And there in front of me lay the plain of Mesopotamia, a vast sea of yellow stretching seemingly to infinity. Who needs a shower anyway, I thought, when they can lie on the edge of their bed and look at this view?
Roll down the years and Mardin could hardly be more different. Today boutique hotels are opening so fast that it's not hard to envisage a day when, as in Cappadocia, almost every house will be seen as a hotel-in-waiting with the locals moving down to the new town and passing the cost of restoring their beautiful old homes to those with deeper pockets and an eye on the profit to be made.
After all, who couldn't love Mardin, a town which seems to have everything going for it? There's the fantastic hillside location, the lovely orientalist architecture, the heady mix of mosques, medreses, monasteries and churches to visit, and two fantastic museums, the newer of the two, the Sabancı Museum
Author: Pat Yale | Source: Today's Zaman [4 September 2011]
