Current Time in Adapazarı, Turkey

Adapazarı is the central district and historic core of the city of Sakarya in northwestern Turkey, lying about a hundred and fifty kilometres east of Istanbul on a broad and exceptionally fertile plain crossed by the Sakarya River. The name means island market, a reference to the low ground enclosed by watercourses on which the original settlement stood. Hills and forests rise to the south and east, and Lake Sapanca lies a short distance to the west. The climate is transitional between Mediterranean and Black Sea patterns, humid and green, with warm summers, mild wet winters and abundant rain.

Around three hundred thousand people live in the district, which is the largest urban centre of Sakarya Province. The surrounding plain is one of the richest agricultural areas in Turkey, producing maize, sugar beet, potatoes, vegetables and above all hazelnuts, of which Turkey is the world's leading producer. Adapazarı has also become an important manufacturing centre, with a large automotive plant nearby, a long established railway rolling stock works that has built carriages and locomotives for the national network for decades, and factories producing buses, machinery and building materials.

The town grew as a market for the plain and as a staging point on the road east from Istanbul, developing rapidly after the railway arrived in the late nineteenth century. Its population has always been mixed, including families of Caucasian, Balkan and Crimean origin who settled here in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and this diversity is reflected in local food and customs.

The defining event in the city's modern history was the earthquake of the seventeenth of August 1999, which struck the North Anatolian Fault zone and caused catastrophic destruction across the region. Adapazarı was among the worst affected places, and thousands of lives were lost. The rebuilding that followed brought stricter construction standards, new residential districts on firmer ground and a national reassessment of earthquake preparedness, and memorial sites in the city commemorate the disaster.

Visitors come chiefly for the countryside. Lake Sapanca, ringed by wooded hills, is a favourite weekend destination for people from Istanbul, with lakeside cafés, walking paths and the villages of Maşukiye and Kartepe nearby, the latter offering skiing in winter. The Acarlar floodplain forest, one of the largest alder swamp forests in Europe, lies to the north, and the Black Sea beaches at Karasu and Kocaali are within an hour. In the city itself there are parks along the river, a museum of local history, an Ottoman era covered market and the well known local speciality of ıslama köfte, meatballs served with bread dipped in broth.

Transport is excellent, with the high speed railway and the motorway between Istanbul and Ankara passing close by and frequent bus services in all directions.

Sakarya University, a large public institution with faculties in engineering, business and medicine, gives the city a student population of tens of thousands.

Adapazarı is important as an industrial and agricultural centre and as a resilient city that has rebuilt itself in one of the most beautiful corners of northwestern Turkey.