“It is a conservator’s dream, a chance to showcase to the world the rich history of an 8,000-year-old living city,” Nevin Soyukaya, an archaeologist and the director of the Diyarbakir Museum, said in an interview this month.

Founded in neolithic times, as a tumulus overlooking the citadel attests, and known in antiquity as Amida, Diyarbakir is one of the oldest continually inhabited cities in the world.

Ruled at times by great empires like the Assyrians and the Byzantines, at other times by local dynasties, it stood at a crossroads of civilizations, linking Mesopotamia with the empires to the east and the north. Coveted, fought over and repeatedly changing hands, “Diyarbakir has always been able to blend the various cultures in its melting pot to create a culture all its own,” Ms. Soyukaya said.

Her museum’s storerooms are overflowing with priceless artifacts unearthed in archaeological digs around the region, she said.

These will soon find a new home in the citadel. Besides an exhibition tracing the history of the city, the museum will house displays exploring the history of agriculture, whose origins in the area between the Euphrates and the Tigris date back thousands of years, as well as religion, architecture and other subjects, all illustrated by artifacts from the area.

The museum complex will also include a conservation and restoration laboratory housed in the former prison; seminar rooms, workshops and an education center; and a restaurant and café. “We want this to be a community center, a living museum,” Ms. Soyukaya said.

But grim reminders of the past keep cropping up. This year, workers digging a ditch for the museum’s plumbing found human skulls and bones near the former prison’s walls. In all, the remains of 38 people were unearthed from the ditch, which remained cordoned off and guarded as a crime scene this month.