Southeastern Turkey is, on the whole, a beautiful land of rugged mountains, wildflowers, and waterfalls. Its caves and ruins are some of the world’s oldest archaeological sites. But the region’s third largest city is somewhat off the tourist trail. It’s a sprawl of nondescript cement buildings on a treeless plateau of no real historical interest—a “charmless modern town,” according to the travel guide I consulted. If visitors come here, they come for only one reason—the town’s unusual name. Holy Turkish toponymy, Batman!
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For centuries, Batman was just a sleepy village called Iluh, but in the 1940s, oil (black gold! Turkey tea!) was discovered in the area, and Iluh—now just a mile or two south of the nation’s largest petroleum field—became a boomtown almost overnight. In 1957, it was renamed for the nearby Batman River, a tributary of the Tigris.
"So where did the Batman River gets its name?", superhero geeks everywhere demand to know at this point. In Turkey and Persia, a batman is an ancient unit of measure—in fact, the word is still defined in plenty of English dictionaries not as “a caped crusader with a cool utility belt” but “a Turkish unit equal to 16.96 pounds.” But most commentators believe that the Batman River actually took its name as a shortening of “Bati Raman,” a nearby mountain.
Batman, Turkey, made world news in 2008 when its mayor, Huseyin Kalkan, announced to the media that he was planning lawsuits against Warner Bros. and director Christopher Nolan, makers of the Dark Knight movie trilogy. “There is only one Batman in the world," he told reporters. "The American producers used the name of our city without informing us." He seemed unconcerned by the fact that the first Batman comics appeared in early 1939, almost two decades before his city began to use the name.
No lawsuit ever materialized, and it became clear that this was merely a canny publicity move by Mayor Kalkan, whose city had taken some media hits lately. I wonder if he knows that there’s a much more famous world city that also came very close to having a legal beef with DC Comics. Melbourne, Australia, was founded by a rancher named John Batman, and so one of the names tossed around for the settlement in its early days was “Batmania.” Personally, I’m disappointed that this didn’t happen. Batman, Turkey and Batmania, Australia would have made a real dynamic duo.
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