ALEPPO, Syria – Reem al-Najjar still remembers when her family would drive for less than two hours across the Turkish border to spend an afternoon shopping in Gaziantep, then bring a box of the finest baklava back home to Aleppo by the evening.

“As Syrians we just needed to show our ID, not even our passport,” recalled 34-year-old al-Najjar. “It was like an extension of our homeland.”

More than a decade has passed since then, and with it the upending of her life after President Bashar al-Assad laid siege to Syria’s cultural capital and economic dynamo during one of the deadliest episodes of the ongoing civil war.

Today, al-Najjar lives on the side of the border she would associate with weekend getaways as one of the 500,000 refugees in Gaziantep and the surrounding province.

But rather just than pining for a bygone era, over the years the displaced citizens have slowly been reshaping their new home to adapt it to their needs – and memories of Aleppo – despite simmering tension with some locals in what’s one of Turkey’s conservative strongholds.

The conflict next door has changed the face of Gaziantep. Renowned for its rich culture and cuisine, it’s one of Turkey’s oldest and most populous cities located in what was ancient Mesopotamia, a crossroads of histories and ethnicities where Turks, Kurds and Arabs coexisted.

While al-Najjar sips her herbal tea at Sakulta, a popular coffee shop in the city, it’s easy to distinguish Arabic chatter in the background, as well as spotting menus in both languages. “Here I feel at home,” said al-Najjar, a translator by trade who is now employed by the UN as an aid worker. “When I walk through these streets, I feel there’s nothing from back home I cannot encounter here.” 

With about 100km between them, Gaziantep and Aleppo were part of the same region under the Ottoman Empire. The latest transformation has brought them back together, not least because of the Gaziantep municipality’s policy of integrating newcomers into urban areas rather than refugee camps.

Even before the Syrian war started in 2011 and almost 4 million people fled north to Turkey, Gaziantep was one of the fastest growing urban areas in the world, expanding from a population of 120,000 in the 1970s to over a million. Since then, it’s become a major humanitarian aid hub and a magnet for Aleppians that were able to find work. 

“The high demand for unskilled labour attracted them to stay here,” said Mehmet Nuri Gultekin, professor of sociology at Gaziantep University, whose research focuses on urban integration of refugees. “But what made urban resilience easier for them is the fact that Gaziantep and Aleppo are twin cities and share a deep, common history and cultural features.”

Not everyone has welcomed that, of course, especially with Turkey’s recent economic malaise. Inflation is running above 80 per cent and there’s greater competition for housing.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was in Gaziantep on Nov 5 with promises of more investment before elections next year as some locals criticised him for allowing Syrians to resettle.

And resettle they have. Gaziantep’s old town with its narrow streets filled with copper workshops and blacksmiths, wrapped around the citadel’s castle towering the city, are images reminiscent of pre-war Aleppo.

Aleppians have built schools, shops and restaurants. The result is streets where Arabic letters stand next to shop signs in Turkish and where Syrian shawarma fast foods share the same space with Turkish kebabci. In some neighborhoods, residents are 90 per cent Arabs. 

With Mr Assad’s Alawite regime taking back control of majority-Sunni Aleppo and the reconstruction of the old city in his hands, the only worry that haunts exiles is that it will never be the same.

As of 2017, more than 100,000 buildings identified as destroyed in Syria, with Aleppo accounting for a third of the total. That’s why at least one restaurateur has decided to make a “blurred copy” in Gaziantep.  

Wael Adeel owner of Antep Sarayi in Gaziantep’s old citadel neighbourhood, fled his hometown and found refuge in Gaziantep in 2020. He took over an old Turkish restaurant with the same architectural features of an old Aleppo house. He looked into how to attract both Syrian and Turkish customers. Then he realised that focusing on its Aleppian identity and catering to the displaced population was the winning solution.

“The food and architecture are very similar, and in a way the thousands of Aleppians exiled by the war are trying to be creative to make it look like home,” said Mr Adeel, 39, whose eatery has live shows of Syrian music on the weekend. “I tried to replicate the same ambiance you would find at a typical restaurant in Aleppo.”

Thanks to its thriving textile and food industry, Gaziantep offered a significant economic opportunity to Syrians, many of whom have opened shops in the city’s bustling streets as well as restaurants, giving work opportunities to Turkish citizens, too.

Soap makers of Aleppo, whose quality is renowned worldwide for skin benefits, have moved their war-ravaged factories to the Turkish city’s outskirts. A decade ago, Gaziantep lacked the economic punch Aleppo once had, but Aleppians are changing that, said Mr Gultekin, the academic.

There’s no doubt, however, that the newcomers have also put a considerable strain on the city’s resources. Rents skyrocketed, and there was also conflict over access to drinking water earlier in the crisis. There were resentments that the aid pouring in was solely allocated to Syrians, not to disadvantaged Turks. In response, the city adopted an integration approach and adapted its infrastructure, housing plans and other services. 

“The idea was to give equal treatment and benefits to disadvantaged Turkish and migrants alike,” said Cemre Kocak, assistant project manager at Gaziantep Youth and Training Association, an NGO helping vulnerable communities in the city. “When you work in disadvantaged neighbourhoods where Turkish and Syrians have the same needs, you have to focus on the disadvantage aspect, not culture or nationality.”

Her association has worked to challenge stereotypes through activities aimed at catering to both Turks and Syrians in mixed parts of the city. They run bilingual educational activities at public community centres in computing, arts, cooking, and English speaking clubs.

Now with more than half of Syrian refugees in Turkey under 18, the biggest concern is formal education. Gaziantep University opened departments with an Arabic curriculum, yet the challenge has been to assimilate Syrians into the Turkish education system. Initially, children were taught the Syrian curriculum in Arabic with the view they would be returning home, said Mr Gultekin. Most of those schools have since shut.

Located in the Turkmenler neighborhood, where 90 per cent of residents are Syrians, one of the few standing primary schools offering classes in Arabic is Kids Rainbow. Registered as an NGO, it opened in 2020 to educate undocumented Syrian children unable to attend Turkish schools.

“The main challenge is that often they don’t feel comfortable going to Turkish schools because of racism issues, both with teachers and students, and they end up dropping out,” said Hiba Jahjah, field officer at Kids Rainbow, who back in her native Syria used to work in a kindergarten.

That problem comes down to segregation, according to Nashwan Jamali, an Aleppian living in Gaziantep since 2013. Turks and Syrians have lived their lives in separate bubbles, rarely interacting with each other, which in risks turning the new Gaziantep into a city within a city, he said.

Jamali, 31, has tried to address this through Room41, a private club organising electro music club events. He was doing that in Aleppo when the war began – until the electricity stopped. When he launched his project in Gaziantep in 2016, his goal was to help the two communities come together, though also to create a place that would give displaced Syrians a reminder of before their country was reduced to rubble.

“It’s a way to forget about the past and unwind in a safe atmosphere, and to make the city feel closer to what home looked like before the conflict,” he said. His parties are also shaking the status quo. “When I oversee the parties, the image I see reflects the city’s changing demographics: foreign NGO workers, Syrians and Turks all dancing together to the rhythm of electronic music. This couldn’t have been imaginable 10 years ago.”

For Mr Adeel, back at Antep Sarayi at the foot of Gaziantep castle, it’s still a fake version of home. He compared it with an old black-and-white postcard of Aleppo. What he wants, too, is for his restaurant to be force for integration as much as a little slice of what life was like in Aleppo. At the moment, only 10 per cent of his customers are Turkish, he estimated.

“We have many foreign customers who come here because that’s the maximum level of Syria they will get – it’s is like a branch of Aleppo,” he said. “I hope more Turks will join our dinners, to understand this new side of Gaziantep.” BLOOMBERG