By Nicola Gryczka Kirsch, September 2026
Some places impress you, and others really stay with you over time.
Mardin, in southeastern Turkey, is one of those places that feels as though you have entered another world. Built above the plains of ancient Mesopotamia, it carries its history not behind museum walls, but through its stones, streets, food, rituals, languages and people.
Walking through its old neighbourhoods, you can truly see how much has been maintained across time. The honey-coloured stone buildings seem to emerge from one another, connected by narrow streets, courtyards and elevated terraces. The city has not simply preserved its heritage; it has retained a relationship between architecture, landscape and everyday life.
The Mardin Cultural Landscape has been on Türkiye’s UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List since 2000. Yet what makes it extraordinary cannot be understood through buildings alone.
Mardin has been shaped by many peoples, cultures, religions and languages: Arabs, Kurds, Turks, Syriac Christians, Armenians and others whose histories remain present in the identity of the place. Mosques, churches, monasteries, markets, homes and kitchens tell the story of a territory created through layers of exchange and coexistence.
Each community has contributed to what Mardin is today.
What if the future of hospitality is partly about remembering?
Being in Mardin brought me back to a question we often explore through our work at Regenopolis:
What if the future of hospitality is, at least in part, about remembering what we already know?
In Mardin, hospitality does not feel like an industry, but it really feels like a way of relating and living. It is sitting down for tea without first checking the time, it is food carrying the memory of generations, it is a table that creates belonging. It is also traditions kept alive not because they have been packaged for visitors, but because they remain part of everyday life in the most authentic and respectful way.
It is also a reminder of the Latin root of hospitality, hospes, a word that holds both host and guest. The relationship was never meant to be one-directional as we so often see in the service industry these days. Host and guest shape one another, and both are shaped by the place that brings them together.
To me, this is at the heart of regenerative hospitality.
It does not begin by arriving somewhere and asking:
What can we build here?
It begins with different questions:
What is already alive here? What makes this place unique? Which relationships, stories, skills and traditions should be strengthened rather than replaced? What does the place need? And what role can hospitality play in helping the whole system thrive?
Regeneration is not something we design elsewhere and place onto a destination. It starts by listening to the living system of a place: its past, its people, its ecology, its tensions and its possibilities.
Two initiatives in Mardin made this especially tangible for me.
Hakkı Bey Konağı: restoration as an act of restraint
In Savur, a historic district of Mardin, Hakkı Bey Konağı offers a beautiful example of what it means to place heritage before standardisation and profit making.
The small, family-owned hotel occupies the historic stone home of Hakkı Sancar, the owners’ great-grandfather. Parts of the building are estimated to be around 120 years old. Its restoration was undertaken with the approval of the relevant conservation authorities and with a commitment to bringing the house back as closely as possible to its original form.
What moved me were not only the large restoration decisions, but the smaller ones.
The staircase remains outside the building. From a conventional hotel perspective, an internal staircase might appear more practical or comfortable, and also more “expected” by a traveller. But moving it would have changed the logic of the house and erased part of how life was originally organised there.
The same principle guided the restoration of the façade. Previous occupants had extended a balcony across much of the building. The family could have retained it and marketed more rooms with private balconies, charging a premium. Instead, they restored the façade to its earlier configuration, with a balcony belonging to only one window in a central position.
These choices may appear small, but they reveal something fundamental: regeneration is often expressed through what we choose not to do or maximise.
Not every square metre needs to be monetised. Not every historic feature needs to be adapted to contemporary expectations or over promoted. Comfort matters, but it does not always need to come at the expense of identity.
The building is also beginning to serve a purpose beyond accommodation, creating space for exhibitions, artistic activities, learning and community engagement. It is becoming not only a place in which visitors sleep, but a platform through which the stories and creativity of Savur can remain alive.
Our conversations with the family are only beginning, and I hope we will continue exploring together how Hakkı Bey Konağı can deepen its role within the community and the wider living system of Mardin
Ebru Baybara Demir: using food to strengthen an entire system
The second story is that of chef, social entrepreneur and longtime Social Gastronomy Movement member, and dear friend, Ebru Baybara Demir.
Ebru’s work demonstrates what becomes possible when food is understood not merely as a product, but as a tool for cultural memory, dignity, livelihoods, biodiversity and connection.
Her work extends far beyond Mardin, from supporting women and displaced communities to disaster response and zero-waste initiatives. In 2023, she received the Basque Culinary World Prize for using gastronomy to generate social change.
But in Mardin, the roots of her work are especially visible and significant as it truly shaped parts of the identity and pride of Mardin.
Through the From Soil to Plate Agricultural Development Cooperative, local producers (particularly women) participate in models that create livelihoods, strengthen shared ownership and bring regional products to market. The initiative has also helped revive heritage ingredients such as Sorgül, an ancient wheat closely connected to the agricultural history of Mesopotamia.
This work reconnects what our industrial food systems have separated: seed, soil, farmer, cook, restaurant, culture and guest.
That same spirit comes alive at Cercis Murat Konağı, the restaurant Ebru established in Mardin with a group of locals. Eating there is not simply a meal. It is a celebration of food, hospitality and the people behind both.
At one point, the cooks line up and enter dancing as they carry the main dish into the room, so that the food does not emerge anonymously from behind a kitchen door. The people who prepared it are seen, and the act of serving becomes a collective and celebratory ritual.
Tradition here is not treated as something placed in a museum, but it is honoured by being practised and celebrated. The restaurant shows how hospitality can keep cultural knowledge alive while generating livelihoods, confidence and pride for the local community.
The ingredients are already here
Mardin does not need someone to arrive with a new identity for the place. Its identity is extraordinarily rich. Many of its ingredients are already present: families restoring historic buildings with care, women building cooperative businesses, chefs protecting ingredients and culinary knowledge, artisans maintaining their crafts, faith communities preserving traditions and peaceful co-habitation, and local entrepreneurs creating experiences rooted in place.
The opportunity now is to connect the dots.
Through our work with other UNESCO heritage sites, such as Lavaux, we have seen how participatory co-creation processes can bring different stakeholders together around a shared territorial vision of a place that already has significant historical heritage. Individual projects are important, but their transformative potential grows when they begin to see themselves as part of the same living system.
What will become possible if Mardin’s community leaders, residents, hospitality businesses, farmers, cooks, artisans, cultural institutions, public authorities and younger generations come together around a shared regenerative ambition?
How can tourism continue contributing to restoring historic buildings, strengthening local agriculture and creating meaningful livelihoods?
How can hospitality help preserve Mardin’s cultural diversity without turning it into a performance for visitors?
How might the value generated by tourism circulate more intentionally within the territory?
And how could Mardin prepare for greater visibility and visitor numbers without losing the intimacy and sense of place that make it so extraordinary?
The work is not to impose one vision on everyone, it is rather a possibility to create the conditions through which a shared direction can emerge, while making room for the different histories, needs and perspectives that form the place.
Looking back to move forward
Mardin reminded me that places we call “ancient” can hold some of the most relevant lessons for how we design the future. We often rush towards the new, the next and the more efficient. Regeneration asks us to pause, and to look back so that we can move forward with greater awareness, while honouring the past. To recognise what should change, but also what should never have been lost.
I left Turkey, as I so often do, deeply touched by its people, its traditions and its extraordinary generosity. I leave Mardin feeling inspired, alife, and hopeful that this is only the beginning of our relationship with the place.
There are many territories around the world that are ready to reconnect with their own stories and unlock new possibilities from within. At Regenopolis, we will continue searching for, learning from and sharing these stories, not as isolated examples, but as ripples of a much wider movement.
Because regeneration does not begin with inventing something new, it begins by remembering who we are, what is already alive, and what becomes possible when we choose to care for it together.
