It has been more than a year since the fighting started in Sur, with young supporters of the P.K.K. guerrillas digging trenches and manning barricades, and more than four months since that fighting ended, with at least 120 civilians, P.K.K. and Turkish security forces killed and scores of homes and buildings destroyed.

The Turkish Army and police won, but victory brought an Aleppo-like landscape. Two dozen acres of the old city have been cleared of the rubble so far, leaving a featureless circular gash on aerial maps. The damage is mostly invisible from street level though, because alleyways leading up to the most devastated areas have been walled up where they intersect with streets that have reopened for business. Three of Sur’s neighborhoods still remain under curfew.

The only apparent entry road to the leveled heart of Sur has a huge curtain strung from building to building across it, and a Scorpion armored police vehicle parked in front painted a menacing shade of black instead of the usual white.

Sur was one of the most pro-P.K.K. neighborhoods of the heavily pro-P.K.K. city of Diyarbakir, the biggest Kurdish city in the world and the unofficial capital of Turkey’s eastern Kurdish regions. Kurds make up an estimated sixth of Turkey’s population, and most of them either openly support the outlawed P.K.K., or vote for the legal party, the Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party, or H.D.P., which shares much of the guerrillas’ political platform.

The name “Sur” means “city wall,” and refers to the 16-foot-thick ancient Roman walls, longer than Jerusalem’s and better preserved than Rome’s, which loop around the municipality and embrace the older parts of Diyarbakir. Once a magnet for tourists, Sur is now festooned with numerous little police posts, parked Scorpions everywhere, and plainclothes officers sauntering around with assault rifles and holstered pistols.