- Cabbar, gözleri yaşararak: "İşte bu iyi," dedi. "Ağasız köy! Herkesin kazandığı, herkesin olacak."
- "This is good," said Cabbar, his eyes filled with tears. "A village without a landowner! Everyone's gain will be everyone's."
- "Memed, My Hawk" by Yaşar Kemal
Çukurova means "hollow plains", in contrast to the mountains hemming in this region. It's the largest tract of low-lying, fertile land in Turkey so it's always been agricultural, and fairly densely populated by ancient standards. It's intensively cultivated and urbanised, so beyond the museums there are few relics of the many civilisations that have dwelt here.
While the main Taurus massif to the west is described elsewhere as the Cilician Mountains, this page includes the narrow arc to the north separating the plains from the Anatolian plateau, the "Cilician Gates". These have always been a major barrier to transport, so the plains were connected as much to the Levant and Middle East as to Byzantine or Ottoman Turkey inland. That connection can be seen today in the oil and gas industries associated with the terminus of pipelines from the Caspian, and by the large numbers of Syrian and Kurdish refugees trying to eke out a living here. NATO jets scream out of İncirlik air base near Adana to war zones barely 15 minutes flying time away.
Modern civil engineering relishes a challenge like the Cilician Gates, and the motorway O-21 now slaloms through from Ankara to Adana. A first attempt to improve their precipitous passes was in 1903 when the Berlin to Baghdad railway was built, and sites associated with that heroic project cleave to the rock faces.
This was one of the last regions of Turkey to have a sizable nomadic population, moving seasonally between mountain and lowland farming. Small numbers of Yörük remain (the name means "walker" or "wanderer") on land that no-one else has yet coveted. Most became settled in the 1860s when the US Civil War cut off cotton supplies to Europe, Çukurova was turned over to lucrative cotton-growing to meet the demand, and nomads were drafted as labour - it was conscription not a job offer.
The works of Yaşar Kemal (1923–2015) are set against the painful changes of Çukurova as it underwent the overlapping agricultural, industrial and Turkish secular revolutions. His best known work Memed, My Hawk is set in the 1920s, where the baddie is a despotic landowner straight out of the Middle Ages, and our hero flees to the mountains where manly virtue makes a last stand. That was the era when Greeks were deported as part of the peace deal after the First World War, other non-Turks saw a better life abroad, and the region ceased to be multi-cultural.
Foreign tourism has hardly touched this region as the beaches and antiquities are far better further west. Nevertheless it is well developed for visitors, and oil and gas plus the military effort means a good standard of accommodation especially in Adana. Local tourism is driven by city dwellers who take summer homes in the mountains, and consider themselves the spiritual heirs of the nomads and of Memed while raging at their poor internet connection.
