Adana

Turkey’s fifth largest city, with a population of 1.1 million, Adana, is a big, brash commercial city with a distinct social and physical divide. North of the D400 highway new cars cruise the leafy streets, lined with apartment blocks with air conditioners hanging from every second window. The further south of the highway you go, the poorer the city becomes, until the modern city dissolves into a sprawl of unplanned houses crammed together, with itinerant lottery ticket salesmen on every corer.

Unfortunately, nearly all the hotels are on the south of town. Adana’s wealth comes from local industry (especially the Sabanci Conglomerate), from the traffic passing through the Cilician Gates, and from the intensely fertile Cukurova, the ancient Cilician plain deposited as silt by the Seyhan and Ceyhan Rivers. Adana’s growth has been rapid and chaotic and today it is considered the commercial capital of the eastern Mediterranean coast. Adana is hardly a tourist mecca: humidity and high heat, terrifying traffic, and limited sights do little to boost its appeal even though Adana has a good selection of hotels serving mostly business people and travelers. However, Adana is an important transport point, and if you happen to spend a night in the city, visit the 16th-century Great Mosque (Ulu Cami), the Ethnography Museum set up in a sweet little Crusader church, the Regional Museum with lots of good Roman artifacts, and the Stone Bridge (Tas Köprü) over the Seyhan River built by Roman emperor Hadrian (117-38 AD).