Silvan (Farqîn): Mayyafariqin, Capital of the Marwanid Kurds
- Mero Ranyayi
- Jun 4
- 6 min read
Introduction
Silvan, known to Kurds as Farqîn and to the medieval world as Mayyafariqin, is today a modest town in the Diyarbakir Province of southeastern Turkey. Yet a thousand years ago it was a royal capital. From here the Marwanids — one of the first great Kurdish dynasties — ruled a kingdom that stretched across the upper Tigris during a period scholars now call the Kurdish Intermezzo.
This is the fourth entry in our geographic series on Greater Kurdistan. After Diyarbakir, the natural next step is its smaller neighbour to the northeast, the city that gave the Marwanid Kurds their throne and that carries, in its very stones, the name of the dynasty’s founder.
Quick Facts
Common Name: Silvan
Kurdish Name: Farqîn
Historic Names: Mayyafariqin (Arabic); Martyropolis (Greek); Np’rkert (Armenian); Mayperqit (Syriac)
Region: Bakur (Northern Kurdistan)
Province: Diyarbakir Province, Turkey
Population: Around 86,000 in the district (recent estimates)
Famous As: The capital of the Kurdish Marwanid dynasty (983–1085)
Key Landmarks: The Great Mosque (Selahaddin Eyyubi Camii) and the nearby Malabadi Bridge
Contents
Origins: Martyropolis, City of Martyrs
The site is ancient, with roots that may reach back to the Bronze Age. In late antiquity it became an important Roman and Byzantine frontier city on the edge of the Sasanian Persian world. Its Greek name, Martyropolis — the “city of martyrs” — came from Marutha, the bishop of Mayyafariqin around the year 400, a scholar and physician who served as a Byzantine envoy to the Persian court. According to tradition, Marutha gathered to the city the relics of Christians killed in the persecutions of the Persian king Shapur II, giving the town its name and its early fame as a Christian centre.
The city has also long been linked, more controversially, to Tigranakert — the capital founded by the Armenian king Tigranes the Great in the first century BC. Silvan is one of two leading candidates for that site, the other being nearby Arzan, and the identification remains debated by historians rather than settled.
The Marwanid Capital
Mayyafariqin’s golden age came with the Marwanids. Around 983, amid the collapse of Buyid authority in the region, a Kurdish chieftain named Abu Shuja Badh ibn Dustak — remembered in the sources as a former shepherd from the Humaydi tribal confederation who took up arms — seized Mayyafariqin and made it the heart of a new principality. When Badh fell in battle in 990, his nephews, the sons of Marwan, inherited and consolidated the realm, giving the dynasty its name.
Under Nasr al-Dawla Ahmad, who ruled for half a century from 1011 to 1061, the Marwanid kingdom reached its height. His court at Mayyafariqin was famed for its prosperity, its scholars and poets, and its building programs; the dynasty’s rule over Amid (Diyarbakir), Mayyafariqin and the Jazira marked one of the high points of medieval Kurdish power. The nearby Malabadi Bridge, pictured above, carries the Kurdish name Pira Mala Badî — “the bridge of the house of Badh” — preserving the dynasty’s memory in stone, though the bridge in its present form is a later, Artuqid-era structure.
For the full story of the dynasty, its rulers and its place in Kurdish history, see our dedicated article on the Marwanid dynasty.
A Center of Learning
Mayyafariqin’s prestige outlived the Marwanids in an unexpected way. The city is the namesake of the Tarikh Mayyafariqin wa-Amid, the great chronicle written by Ibn al-Azraq al-Fariqi, who was born in the city around 1116. His history of Mayyafariqin and Amid, drawing on Syriac and Arabic sources, is one of the most important surviving sources for the Marwanid period and for the medieval history of the whole region — a reminder that this small town was once a place where history was not only made but written.
Decline: Seljuks, Artuqids and Ayyubids
The Marwanid kingdom did not survive the rise of the Great Seljuks. In the 1080s the Seljuk sultan Malik-Shah I took Mayyafariqin, and the dynasty’s treasures were carried off; the last Marwanid was left with little more than the town of Jazirat ibn Umar (modern Cizre) before the line ended around 1085. The region then passed to the Artuqids, the Turkmen dynasty whose rulers commissioned the Malabadi Bridge and rebuilt the city’s Great Mosque in the mid-twelfth century.
That mosque, known today as the Selahaddin Eyyubi Camii after later Ayyubid-era restorations, still stands at the centre of Silvan, its great dome and carved façades a survival of the city’s medieval grandeur. The Ayyubids — the dynasty of Saladin, himself of Kurdish origin — and later the Ottomans, who took the region in 1516, each left their mark before Mayyafariqin gradually faded into a provincial town.
Modern Silvan and Farqîn
The Arabic name Mayyafariqin was used into the early twentieth century, but the people of the town have long preferred the shorter Kurdish form, Farqîn. Today Silvan is a Kurdish-majority district town of around 86,000 people, set in the farmland northeast of Diyarbakir.
Like much of the region, it was drawn into the renewed conflict between the Turkish state and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). In August 2015, Silvan saw serious clashes and round-the-clock curfews as fighting spread across the southeast, part of the same wave of urban confrontation that devastated the Sur district of Diyarbakir. The town’s deep history sits, as it does across Bakur, alongside a difficult and unresolved present.
Timeline of Key Events
c. 400 AD — Bishop Marutha makes the city Martyropolis.
c. 80 BC — Possible (disputed) identification with Armenian Tigranakert.
983 — Badh ibn Dustak seizes Mayyafariqin, founding Marwanid rule.
990 — The sons of Marwan inherit and consolidate the dynasty.
1011–1061 — The golden reign of Nasr al-Dawla Ahmad.
c. 1085 — Seljuk Malik-Shah I takes the city; the Marwanid kingdom ends.
1146–1155 — The Artuqids build the Malabadi Bridge nearby.
c. 1152–1157 — The Great Mosque is rebuilt in its present form.
1516 — Ottoman conquest of the region.
2015 — Clashes and curfews during the renewed Kurdish–Turkish conflict.
Debates and Controversies
Silvan’s past is layered and contested. The identification with Armenian Tigranakert is the oldest scholarly dispute, still unresolved between Silvan and Arzan. The city’s name as Martyropolis records a deep Christian — Armenian and Assyrian — heritage that long predates and then coexisted with Kurdish and Arab populations; as across the region, those Christian communities were devastated in the genocides of 1915. The Marwanids’ Kurdish identity, by contrast, is well supported: it is attested in medieval sources and accepted by the broad consensus of modern scholarship, even if a few genealogical details have been read in different ways. Honest history here means holding both truths at once — a celebrated Kurdish royal capital, and a town whose older, plural past should not be erased.
Legacy and Significance
It is easy to pass through Silvan today without realising what it once was. But for students of Kurdish history, Mayyafariqin is hallowed ground: the capital of the Marwanids, the setting of one of the great medieval chronicles, and a place whose stones and bridges still carry the names of Kurdish rulers. In the long story of Kurdish statehood — so often a story of what was lost — Farqîn stands as a reminder that there were centuries when Kurds ruled from their own thrones, in their own cities, on this very land.
Related Places and Topics
Diyarbakir (Amed), the great neighbouring city the Marwanids also ruled. Hasankeyf, another town of the medieval Tigris. Cizre, the last Marwanid holdout. The Marwanid dynasty, the kingdom that made Mayyafariqin its capital. The early Kurdish emirates and the Kurdish Intermezzo.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Silvan’s connection to the Kurds?
Silvan, Kurdish Farqîn, was the capital of the Marwanid dynasty (983–1085), one of the first major Kurdish principalities. It remains a Kurdish-majority town today.
What was Mayyafariqin?
Mayyafariqin is the medieval name of Silvan. Earlier called Martyropolis, it served as the principal capital of the Marwanid Kurds and the seat of their most important court and architecture.
Is Silvan the ancient Tigranakert?
Possibly. Silvan is one of two main candidates for the Armenian city of Tigranakert, the other being Arzan. The identification is debated and not firmly established.
Why is the Malabadi Bridge linked to Silvan?
The nearby Malabadi Bridge carries the Kurdish name Pira Mala Badî, “the bridge of the house of Badh,” after the Marwanid founder — though the surviving bridge is an Artuqid-era structure from the twelfth century.
References and Further Reading
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