I visited the city of Mardin, where Turkish, Syrian, and Kurdish people live together. What I found was a culture of pluralism under siege.
A café in Mardin.(Saliha Bayrak)
My childhood summers in Turkey were marked by adult chatter about the Syrian refugees that had supposedly overrun the country. This sort of talk—about how immigrants survived on freebies, skyrocketed inflation, and even became, could you believe, comfortable enough to put up storefronts with Arabic signage—would only become more and more familiar as I got older.
At its peak in 2022, Turkey hosted over 3 million displaced Syrians, nearly two-thirds of the Syrian refugee community worldwide. Around the same time the Syrian civil war sent its citizens looking for new homes, Turkey’s economy plummeted. From 2011—when Turkey first began admitting Syrians—to 2019, unemployment in Turkey increased from about 10 to 14 percent, while inflation similarly escalated.
Syrians received a disproportionate amount of blame for the country’s unfortunate fate, and consequently became victim to political attacks, online vitriol, and violent hate crimes. After the fall of Bashar el-Assad in 2024, it seemed like people in Turkey had conclusively decided that their hospitality had come to an end. The mayor of Şehitkamil, a town in Gaziantep province where many Syrians relocated, aptly described the situation at the time: “I have come where I am even willing to get in my own car and take [Syrians] away if necessary.” While at least half a million Syrians have returned to their home country, a large portion of Syrians will remain in Turkey, a place where those under temporary protection status have received free healthcare, started businesses, and grown their families. Meanwhile, people in Turkey are forced to reckon with the fact their once seemingly temporary neighbors might be there to stay—and reactions range from disdain to warm embrace.
When I arrived in Turkey this past summer, months after Assad had been replaced, I was curious to see what relations were like with Syrian neighbors. I set out for Mardin, a city just 20 miles away from the Syrian border: a place where marginalized ethnic and religious groups indigenous to the area—like Kurds, Yezidis, Assyrians, and Arabs—have lived together for decades, and in the past decade or so, have welcomed thousands of refugees from Syria.
I wondered if, with enough pressure, even the diverse and ever-hospitable people of southeastern Turkey would have been convinced to turn their back on their neighbors by now.
Within days of arriving in Mardin, I was invited into the home of a Syrian family led by a matriarch named Maryam. Originally from Al-Hasakah—the site of one of the firsts acts of protest against the Assad regime in 2011, and a home of battle between the rebels, old regime, Islamic State, and Kurdish militias thereafter—Maryam’s daughter was sent to Mardin first in 2017, followed by Maryam and her husband two years later. This period of separation was not easy to live through, but neither was the war.
Maryam described the Syrian Civil War as an earthquake with many aftershocks. While one neighborhood was recovering from attacks, violence quickly sparked elsewhere. In a heavily sectarian war, there were Christian neighborhoods that remained untouched, while Sunni Muslims were targeted by the regime. Months had passed since Assad’s regime had been toppled when I visited Maryam’s home, but her loved ones were telling her not to come back; that the chaos, death, shortage of food and water persisted. We don’t even know who is responsible for the violence anymore, Maryam said in Arabic, we just see the devastation.
The people of Mardin were generally empathetic and helpful to Syrians when they first arrived. But life in Mardin is getting harder for everyone, Maryam told me, not just for refugees, but locals too. Things are getting more expensive as the city experiences a tourism boom. And Turkey just went through one of its driest seasons of the last 65 years, with Mardin being one of the cities most heavily impacted by this drought. On top of that, this region has historically been one of the poorest in Turkey. Maryam told me that the city prioritizes tourist areas when there’s a water shortage, leaving neighborhoods like theirs—where both refugees and locals live—sometimes for days without water.
Maryam’s teenage daughter (whose name I am keeping anonymous for safety reasons) was carefully listening to our conversation when we spoke, sometimes getting up to bring us water. While her mother said the locals were mostly welcoming to them, she didn’t always feel the same: She told me about bullies in school, where even her teachers would blatantly favor non-Syrian students. Her only friends were other Syrians. Later, a young worker at the shawarma shop would share a similar sentiment, telling me he had gotten beaten up at least once for being Syrian. I wondered whether the challenges these young Syrians faced at school simply reflect the brutal nature of adolescence, or the ethos of a globalized generation more inclined to hateful ideologies.
One of the very first people I met in Mardin was Fırat, a business owner and family clinic doctor local to the region who had treated Yezidi and Syrian refugee families that had been victims to both the Assad regime and ISIS. “We tried to be as helpful as possible,” he said. But he knows that there are many families that he’s never been able to reach. “You come across a home in a giant field, and you find a family living there with broken windows, freezing temperatures, no proper furniture, and a sick child. They don’t even have any official proof of their existence.”
He said that empathy is the most immediate, natural reaction when meeting people who have survived a war and live in such conditions. “Cleaning the rubble inside of someone is not as simple,” he said. But people have become conditioned toward bigotry because of the paranoia-inducing rhetoric peddled by politicians and spread across social media. This comes as no surprise to me as an American, of course. But in this hodgepodge of a city, “you might not even realize someone is Syrian unless you are told,” Fırat said. Yet, he continued, Mardin is impacted by a global rise in right-wing, cultural populism as everywhere.
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Maryam’s daughter had been out of school since graduating high school the previous year, and many of her days passed by in a haze of boredom. Her family said that the fees to attend university are too expensive for their family. Without many prospects, she told me she had no dreams for the future, nor an idea of what she enjoyed doing in her free time. Like her mother, she had learned to weather her expectations for life. I worried that this next generation would lose their ties to one another, that they were more vulnerable to being folded into a now global culture that emphasized nativism and individuality, as the big cities in the west of Turkey like Istanbul seemed to already have.
After spending the day with Maryam and her daughter, my local guide and I decided to go to a sıra gecesi: an event unique to this region where locals would historically gather to chat about recent events, listen and dance to folk music, and enjoy eating traditional food. These nights have morphed more into a highly sought-after evening of entertainment for tourists and locals alike, and we found ourselves enjoying a multicourse meal while being serenaded by a musical performer and his band. Here, all the pains in this city turn into something more soothing and melodic. The performer on stage, a man who was taking drags of his cigarette between delivering verses in a deep, striking voice, read a rendition of a poem by Ercan İntaş:
“I am an olive tree in Delik, Mardin; a demolished wall in Germany; the Statue of Liberty in America; an aged wine in France.… A hungry child in Somalia; a gram of cocaine in the Netherlands; A refugee camp in Iraq.… From the East and West; the North and South, we are children of this heavenly homeland, we are Turkish, we are Kurdish, we are Alevi, we are Assyrians, we are Cherkez, we are Human!”
This sentiment, in a country where ethnonationalist sentiments long held wide influence, moved me deeply. Later, a Kurdish folk dancer took over the room with swift, steady moves and an infectious smile, before everyone was invited to the dance floor for halay.
The next day, I quickly learned how small of a city Mardin really is: The population is about 85 times smaller than Istanbul, where I had spent many of my summers. Within days, I found myself surrounded by familiar faces. Walking down the street, I immediately recognized the folk dancer from the night before, working behind an ice cream stand. I learned that his name is Ferhan, and that he taught folk dances to Syrian refugees for many years. I felt giddy realizing how intertwined the community was. I asked him to tell me more about his thoughts on refugees. “We have enough land for everybody,” he told me. “The west [of Turkey] has always seen the east as rough and uncultured.” But it’s their part of the country that has the advantage, because “the east has been able to preserve customs and traditions,” he continued. “We haven’t lost our respect, love, and tolerance. We show unrequited respect to those who come from outside.”
Today, Kurdish, Assyrian, and Arab people live on both sides of the Turkish-Syrian border, many with families sprawled across the two nations. While these groups seem to be so divided today, it wasn’t always like this. The land they once inhabited together was divided by a series of treaties and declarations made by colonial powers after the First World War and the fall of the Ottoman Empire, set in motion by the secret Sykes-Picot agreement in 1916. Outside powers carved the Middle East out in their image, prioritizing their interests over religious, ethnic, and cultural affinities and already locally established modes of governance. Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine were divided into different French- and British-administered areas. After Turkish nationalists agreed upon a fixed border with then-French-controlled Syria and declared independence, they initiated a mission of “Turkification” against the Kurds and other minorities that fell within their borders. Those who challenged this process in the following decades were held in infamously brutal military prisons from Diyarbakır to Eskişehir.
This had detrimental effects in the southeast: A few miles from the city center, in the border town of Nusaybin, heavy clashes between the militant separatist group Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and Turkish troops in 2016 killed dozens and displaced tens of thousands of people. (The PKK has since laid down their arms, citing increased Democratic channels for Kurdish people in Turkey.) When I visited Nusaybin, new construction projects stood as the eerie ghosts of entire neighborhoods that had been demolished. Locals told me about seeing carcasses floating through the streets and families being separated as they evacuated. Parents told me they understood, then, how Syrians must have felt fleeing with their children.
Imet many more wonderful people in Mardin throughout my trip, who reminded me that while the younger generation is at greater risk of absorbing disdainful ideas towards “the other” that are on the rise globally, the region’s customs of pluralism still carry weight.
There was the owner of a local artisan copper store, Serdal. He had been working side by side with his Syrian friend for 14 years, helping him resettle after the civil war and start his tailoring business, which stood right next door. People like Serdal and Ferhan were adamant that they could protect their local traditions of tolerance despite all the hardships this region has faced. I too believed it was possible, so long as they maintained their immediate connections in this small, tight-knit community.
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After I returned home, I searched for the rest of the poem that the singer was performing on stage on our night out. There were several lines that either he never read, or I never wrote down. “I don’t like money but I work for it. I think of my mother while I work and I weep, the sweat on my forehead mixes with my tears.” The poem continued, “I have rejected the drawn borders. I am the avalanche that fell in Hakkari, the coal mine in Şırnak, the solitary confinement cell in Eskişehir, and the fairy chimneys in Nevşehir…”
Mardin showed me that a shared homeland is possible; I had already known, but needed to be reminded, that division is never natural. The people I met in this preserved pocket of ancient civilization—a rare place where Kurdish, Syrian, and Turkish people lived side by side—not only had to fight against their own nation’s historical currents of ethnonationalism, but were also living under constant threat of being swallowed whole by the nativist ideas spewed by global hegemons in the West. For now, their collective troubles is what joined them.
Saliha BayrakSaliha Bayrak is an associate editor at The Drift and a freelance reporter based in New York. Her writing appears in publications like Texas Monthly, Acacia Magazine, and The Nation, where she worked as a fact-checker in 2024.