Amed is a fishing village in the east of Bali.
Understand
Amed is the most recent tourist development area in Bali. It was only in 2000 that tarmac was laid on the roads, telephone lines were installed in 2003, and it took until 2007 for a bridge to be built over a section of the road that regularly washed away during the rainy season. To this day, phone lines are so limited in the area that most hotels only have one landline each, so it is wise to bring a mobile phone (cellphone) when visiting if you need to stay in touch with the outside world. Local Indonesian SIM cards can be purchased in thousands of places around Bali. There is also a public telephone office in the centre of Amed and a couple of internet cafes (the connection speed is V-E-R-Y slow, though).
English is widely spoken in all the hotels, restaurants and shops.
Get around
There are public 'bemos' that pass through Amed several times a day but the easiest way to get around is to hire a car and driver.
See
Most people come to Amed as a getaway, including expats from other parts of the island. It's a favourite honeymoon destination for tourists and is also popular with divers and snorkelers. Sailing trips in small Balinese sail boats can be arranged, and day trips to local places of interest such as the Water Gardens of Tirtagangga and Bali's most sacred temple, Besakih, high on the slopes of Mount Agung.
Do
For entertainment, a local live band performs at Double One Restaurant once a week and there are sometimes free Balinese dance performances in some of the restaurants. A local Gong & Genjek group performs about once a month in the Bali Mandala room at Dancing Dragon Cottages.
Buy
There are a few shops in Amed selling basic necessities (shampoo, bottled water, etc) as well as sarongs and tee-shirts, but it does not have the range of handicrafts and clothing shops that other tourist areas have.
Eat
Sleep
There is a wide range of hotels in the area, with rooms ranging from $20 - $200 per night. Most of them have been built by westerners in partnership with Balinese people and have brought a welcome increase in employment to the area. Everyone knows everyone so there is a real feeling of village community, but the hotels are well spaced out so you feel that you have your own private space there. There are no TVs in most of the hotel rooms, so bring a good book to read or better still, spend your time getting to know the locals. The pace of life is very slow and relaxed in Amed, the people are friendly, and they have time!
Stay safe
Diyarbakır (Diyâr-i Bekr دیاربکر 'land of the Bekr' as derived from Persian; Kurdish Amed; Syriac ; Greek Amida; Armenian Ամիդ Amid) is a major city in the Southeastern Anatolia region of Turkey. The city is situated on the banks of the River Tigris, and is the seat of the Diyarbakır Province. In the 2000 census, the city had a population of 546,000, and its metropolitan area was home to 721,000 inhabitants, as of 2005. It is the second-largest city in Turkey's Southeastern Anatolia region, after Gaziantep. Within Turkey, Diyarbakır is famed for its culture, rich folklore and famed watermelons.
Diyarbakır has a large Kurdish population, prompting some sources to describe it as the "unofficial capital" for the country's Kurdish minority, of the country's Kurdish-speaking region, and of Turkish Kurdistan. This term has no administrative basis and is open to controversy. According to a November 2006 survey by the Sur Municipality, one of Diyarbakır's metropolitan municipalities, 72 % of the inhabitants of the municipality use Kurdish the most in their daily speech, followed by Turkish, and 69 % are illiterate in their most widely used vernacular.
Etymology
The modern name 'Diyarbakır' originates from an Ottoman Turkish Language name, which in turn was based on the Arabo-Persian name Diyâr-i Bekr ('Land of the Bekr'). Composed of the word Diyar (ديار), Arabic for region or district, followed by the Persian ezafe "-i" and Bekr (بکر), it probably denoted the landholdings of the Arab Bekr tribe that settled in the area following the Islamic conquest in the 7th Century.
However, the Kurdish scholar Professor Mehrdad Izady, of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University, suggests an alternative argument in his book The Kurds: A Concise Handbook, according to which the name of the capital Amid would have been changed by the Bagirawand or Bagratid Kurdish Dynasty (the Kurdish branch of Georgian Bagrationi and Armenian Bagratuni dynasties) to refer to themselves.
History
"Amid(a)" was the capital of the Aramean kingdom Bet-Zamani from the 13th century B.C. onwards. “Amid†is the name used in the Syriac sources, which also testifies to the fact that it once was the seat of the Church of the East Patriarch and thus a Assyrian or Syriac stronghold that produced many famous Syriac theologians and Patriarchs; some of them found their final resting place in the St. Mary Church. There are many relics in the Church, such as the bones of the apostle Thomas and St. Jacob of Sarug (d. 521).
The city was called Amida when the region was under the rule of the Roman and then the Byzantine Empires. From 189 BCE to 384 CE, the area to the east and south of present-day Diyarbakır, was ruled by a Kurdish kingdom known as Corduene. It later became a province of the Roman Empire in 66 BCE.
In 359, Shapur II of Persia captured Amida after a siege of seventy-three days. The Roman soldiers and a large part of the population of the town were massacred by the Persians. The heroic siege is vividly described by Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus who was an eyewitness of the event and survived the massacre by escaping from the town.
The Kurdish dynasty of Marwanid ruled the area of Diyarbakır during the 10th and 11th centuries CE. After the Battle of Manzikert, the city has been under the rule of the Mardin branch of Oghuz Turkish beylik (principality) of Artuklu (circa 1100-1250 in effective terms, although almost a century longer nominally). It has been disputed between the Ilkhanate and Ayyubid dynasties along with its surrounding region for a century after which it was taken over by the rising Turkmen states of Kara Koyunlu (the Black Sheep) first and Ak Koyunlu (the White Sheep). Following the Ottoman ascendancy established by Selim I in the region, the city has become part of the Ottoman Empire since the reign of Sultan Süleyman I's campaign of Irakeyn (the two Iraqs, e.g. Arabian and Persian) in 1534, at the same time as Mosul, Baghdad and Basra.
The Ottoman eyalet of Diyarbekir covered the geography corresponding to Turkey's southeastern provinces today, a rectangular area between the Lake Urmia to Palu and from the southern shores of Lake Van to Cizre and the beginnings of the Syrian desert, although its borders saw some changes over time. In 1864 , together with the passage into vilayet system, it became the seat of the Vilayet of Diyarbekir.
Armenian historians at one time hypothesized that Diyarbekir was the site of the ancient Armenian city of Tigranakert, (pronounced Dikranagerd in the Western Armenian dialect) and by the 19th century the Armenian inhabitants were referring to the city as Dikranagerd. Scholarly research has shown that while the ancient Armenian city was in the close vicinity, it in fact is not the same place. The real location of Dikranagerd remains debated, but Armenians who trace their ancestry to Diyarbekir continue to refer to themselves as "Dikranagerdtsi" (native of Dikranagerd.) The "Dikranagerdtsi's" or Armenians of Diyarbekir were noted for having one of the most unusual dialects of Armenian, hard to understand for a speaker of standard Armenian.
In the 19th century, Diyarbakır prison had gained infamy throughout the Ottoman Empire as a site where political prisoners from the enslaved Balkan ethnicities were sent to serve harsh sentences for speaking or fighting for national freedom.
The 20th century was a turbulent one for Diyarbakır. During World War I most of the city's Syriac and Armenian population was driven from the city. After the surrender of the Ottoman Empire, French troops attempted to occupy the city.
Rural to urban movement has often been the first step in a migratory pattern that has taken large numbers of Kurds from the east to the west. Diyarbakır, grew from 30,000 in the 1930s to 65,000 by 1956, to 140,000 by 1970, to 400,000 by 1990, and swelled to about 1.5 million by 1997.
The 41-year-old American-Turkish Pirinçlik Air Force Base near Diyarbakir, known as NATO's frontier post for monitoring the former Soviet Union and the Middle East, completely closed on 30 September 1997. This return was the result of the general drawdown of US bases in Europe and improvement in space surveillance technology. The base near the southeastern city of Diyarbakir housed sensitive electronic intelligence-gathering systems that kept an ear on the Middle East, Caucasus and Russia.
Features
The city is surrounded by a dramatic and intact set of black basalt walls extending in a 5.5 km circle around the old city. The dramatic warren of alleyways and old-fashioned tenement blocks which makes up the old city contrast dramatically with the sprawling suburbs of modern apartment blocks and gecekondu slums to the west. Diyarbakır boasts numerous medieval mosques and madrassahs, crowned by the 11th century Ulu Cami ("Great Mosque") constructed by alternating bands of black basalt and limestone. The same patterning was used in the 16th century Deliler Han Madrassah, which is now a hotel, and the 12th century Castle Mosque (Kale Camii).
The Syriac Orthodox church of Our Lady (Ü Ü•ÜÜ Ü•Ü¬ ÜÜ Ü—Ü`Idto d-Yoldat Aloho, Meryemana kilisesi), was first constructed as a pagan temple in the 1st century BCE, and is still in use as a place of worship today.
Always a centre of Kurdish nationalism, Diyarbakır became a stronghold of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) after the beginning of the guerilla war in southeastern Turkey in 1984 . During this conflict, the population of the city grew dramatically as villagers from remote areas where fighting was serious left or were forced to leave for the relative security of the city. Diyarbakır was also one of the areas where the Kurdish Hezbollah was most active in the early to mid 1990s, with this group often targeting PKK activists and the city's tiny Christian community of Armenians and Syriacs.
After the PKK's cessation of hostilities, a large degree of normality returned to the city, with the Turkish government declaring a 15 year period of emergency rule over on 30 November, 2002. The local economy is slowly improving.
Notable residents
See also
External links
