Adana

I’ll admit I went to Adana for a single, focused reason: to eat an Adana kebab in the city that gave it its name, cooked the way it’s supposed to be cooked, which turned out to be a genuinely different experience from every version I’d eaten anywhere else in Turkey. The dish is deceptively simple — hand-minced lamb, generously laced with red pepper, molded onto a wide flat skewer and grilled fast over charcoal — but the version I had at a decades-old kebapçı near the city center, served with a scorch of char on the outside and a properly aggressive heat running through the meat, made every other Adana kebab I’d eaten feel like an approximation. It came with a pile of grilled tomatoes and peppers, thin lavash, raw onion mixed with sumac, and a shot glass of şalgam — a startlingly sour, fermented turnip and carrot juice that I initially disliked and then, by the second glass, actively craved.

Adana sits on the Çukurova plain, one of Turkey’s most productive agricultural regions, and the heat that makes the farmland so fertile also makes the city itself brutally hot for much of the year — I arrived in early summer and the air had a physical weight to it by midday, the kind of heat that empties the streets between noon and five and fills them again only once the sun starts to drop.

A Roman Bridge Still Doing Its Job

The Taşköprü, a stone bridge across the Seyhan River originally built in the Roman era and rebuilt several times since, particularly under Emperor Hadrian, is still in active use today — I walked across it in the evening alongside actual local commuter traffic, which struck me as a small miracle of infrastructure, a two-thousand-year-old bridge quietly still doing its job while modern Adana carries on around it. From the bridge you can see the enormous Sabancı Central Mosque, one of Turkey’s largest, its six minarets lit up against the evening sky and reflected in the river below.

Adana doesn’t get the same tourist attention as the coastal towns further west, and I think that’s partly because it doesn’t need it — the city has a confident, unpretentious character built on genuinely excellent food and a working agricultural economy rather than a tourism industry. I left with şalgam-stained fingers, a recipe I never quite managed to replicate at home, and a real appreciation for a city that knows exactly what it’s good at.

When to go: Spring (April-May) or autumn (October-November) to avoid the punishing Çukurova summer heat, which regularly pushes past 40°C in July and August.