Why it looks like this

At the centre of Gaziantep stands the citadel, on a mound built up by layer after layer of settlement since the Bronze Age. Around it wraps the old town: stone lanes, copper-smiths' bazaars, khans and courtyard houses — the commercial core of a city that has traded between Anatolia, Syria and Mesopotamia for millennia.

The modern city of boulevards and industrial zones spread outward in the 20th century, and after 2011 Gaziantep grew again, absorbing hundreds of thousands of refugees from nearby Syria.