Diyarbakır Walls & Hevsel

“I want a homeland / Where the sky is blue, the branch green, the field yellow; / Where birds of every kind fill its gardens…” says Cahit Sıtkı Tarancı, the poet from Diyarbakır. Reading these lines, you can’t help thinking of the Hevsel Gardens stretching right at the foot of the walls of the city where he was born; for there the sky truly is blue, the branch truly green, and the birds truly of every kind… So what keeps a city standing for thousands of years: its walls, or the gardens that feed it?