Adana has been settled for eight thousand years and the layers still show: Hittite Adaniya beneath Tepebağ, Armenian Cilician castles out on the plain, Ramazanoğlu mosques in Kemeraltı, and cotton-boom churches from the Republic's first decades.
Turkey's largest museum complex occupies the 1907 Milli Mensucat cotton mill: Hittite reliefs, Çukurova Neolithic finds and the Roman Achilles sarcophagus lifted from a Seyhan field. Labels run in Turkish and English.
Raised in 1501 by the Ramazanoğlu beys around the Byzantine church of St James, the Oil Mosque gives itself away with a Gothic-arched west portal. The attached medrese and Halil Bey minaret complete a tight medieval group.
Ancient Mopsuestia lies 27km east on the Ceyhan river. The museum is built directly over a 4th-century basilica floor showing Noah's Ark with paired animals; Roman bridge piers and a Mamluk han stand a short walk away.
The Snake Castle crowns a lone crag above the Ceyhan plain, built by the Armenian kings of Cilicia in the 13th century and named for a serpent relief once carved on its gate. Eight towers still stand nearly full height.
Adana's clock tower went up in 1882 under governor Abidin Pasha and, at 32 metres, remains the tallest in Turkey. Rebuilt after the 1998 Ceyhan earthquake, its bell still marks the hour over the tin roofs of the covered market.
The 1880 church is known citywide for the Virgin statue on its roof — the 'baby' of the nickname. Built for the Levantine trading families of the cotton boom, it came through the 1909 events and still holds Sunday mass.
Mustafa Kemal stayed in this Levantine villa during his March 1923 visit, when he told Adana's cotton workers the republic's future lay in production. The rooms keep his desk, original telegrams and Çukurova factory photographs.
The Liberation Monument marks 5 January 1922, the day French occupation forces withdrew from Adana after three years. Its bronze group — a woman, a fighter, a child — faces the road the departing troops actually took.
The oldest surviving civil building in the city, raised around 1490 as the Ramazanoğlu beylik's residence and later used as a salt depot. Two floors of stone rooms keep painted ceiling panels and a small hamam off the courtyard.
Coppersmiths have hammered in these alleys since the 16th century and you hear the workshops before you see them. The vaulted Bedesten alongside was built under the Ramazanoğulları and still trades cloth, spice and re-tinned pans.
Built in 1845 as the Greek Orthodox church of St Elias, it served Adana's Rum community until the 1924 population exchange, then worked as a cinema and a mosque before becoming a monument museum. The iconostasis niches survive.
A 22-metre mound holding roughly 8,000 years of settlement — Adana's original core, identified with Hittite Adaniya. Late-Ottoman merchant houses with carved timber bay windows ring the summit, several restored as courtyard cafés.