The Stone Bridge Is Still Carrying Traffic

Hester Callow · 16 August 2026

A Roman bridge over the Seyhan that has been in continuous use for most of two thousand years.

What It Is

The Taşköprü crosses the Seyhan on a long line of stone arches, and it is among the oldest bridges anywhere still carrying people across a river. Not a monument with a fence round it. A bridge.

It has been repaired, widened, narrowed and repaired again across every empire that has held this plain, which is most of them. What you are walking on is a composite of about fifteen centuries of maintenance.

Walking It

It is pedestrianised now, which is recent and correct, and it takes about ten minutes end to end if you do not stop. You will stop.

Early morning and the hour before sunset are when it is worth being there, partly for the light on the water and mostly because the middle of an Adana afternoon is not a time to be standing on unshaded stone.

What Is Around It

The river park either side is where the city actually goes in the evening: families, tea, people fishing without much conviction.

The mosque with the six minarets is directly upstream and in frame from the middle of the bridge, which is the photograph everyone takes and is worth taking.

The River Itself

The Seyhan is dammed upstream and the flow through the city is managed, so it runs steadier and greener than a river on this plain has any natural right to.

That is why the park either side works. A river that flooded unpredictably would not have twenty kilometres of tea gardens along it.