“Green Home” Population: 63,000
***Malatya was terribly damaged by the earthquakes of 2023. I don’t know how well or otherwise Yeşilyurt came through them.***
Just a hop and a skip away from the centre of Malatya pretty little Yeşilyurt is well worth a quick visit, especially if you combine it with a trip to even prettier Gündüzbey, a brief 1km up the road.
There are no specific sights to see here, just a lot of graceful late Otttoman houses built of plastered mud-brick, some of them slowly decaying but others smartly restored. Indeed, most of the main street has now been restored, the centrepiece being a magnificent house-cum-shop with a cihannüma (lantern) on its roof.
As in Battalgazi (Eski Malatya), many of the houses, especially those that have not been restored, come with superstructures of wood. It seems churlish to label them simply çatı (lofts) when some are multi-layered and split into many different areas, often accessible by ladder. They formed an essential part of a lifestyle which involved lots of storage for winter which is now on its very last legs.
As you come into town from Malatya you will see one of the very finest mansions in town, the Abdullah Ağa Konağı, which is still to be restored but shares many of the architctural characteristics of the Beşkonaklar in Malatya – look at the rafters beneath the jutting cumbas (bay windows) and you’ll see a single rose carved into one of them.
The elegance of the Ottoman houses standing amid gardens full of fruit trees could hardly stand in sharper contrast with the endless succession of tower blocks rising up along the road back into Malatya.
Transport info
Frequent dolmuşes leave Egemenlik Caddesi in the centre of Malatya for Yeşilyurt. They keep going until quite late in the evening.
If you want to visit Gündüzbey as well, take the dolmuş from the same place in Malatya to the end of the line. You can then amble back downhill to Yeşilyurt and pick up a return dolmuş to Malatya there.
Day trip destinations
