Most people come to Şanlıurfa for its prehistory: Göbeklitepe, a Neolithic place of worship on a hill above the Harran Plain, and the city's archaeology museum, which holds what was dug up there. In the city, the sacred carp pools of Balıklıgöl, bound up with the story of Abraham, lie at the foot of the castle hill, close to the museum complex at Haleplibahçe and to old mosques, several of them converted churches. Further out are Karahantepe, the ruins and domed houses of Harran, and Halfeti on the Euphrates. Each has its own page here.
Göbeklitepe
Göbeklitepe stands near the village of Örencik, outside the city, and it was never a settlement: people gathered here to worship, not to live. Its use runs back about twelve thousand years and stops around 8000 BC. It is held to be both the oldest and the biggest cult centre yet found. Klaus Schmidt led the digging from 1995 until he died in 2014, and UNESCO inscribed the site in 2018.
Look for the T-shaped stone pillars, the tallest about six metres high and up to forty tonnes in weight. Ten or twelve form a ring joined by walls, with a bigger pair facing each other in the middle; six rings are excavated, and geomagnetic readings point to nearly twenty. Many pillars carry animals or symbols, and those given arms and hands are read as people. A shuttle runs from the reception building to the dig in roughly a minute, and the excavation is roofed and circled by a walkway, so the weather matters less than usual.
Karahantepe and the Tek Tek Mountains
Karahantepe sits on a limestone rise 55 kilometres from the centre, inside the Tek Tek Mountains National Park, a low plateau between the Harran and Viranşehir plains. The local stone splits into sheets and supplied both walls and pillars. Surface work has mapped west and east terraces where pillar tops break the ground and outline round buildings, a South Flat with grinding stones, and quarries where the beds the pillars came from are still visible.
Balıklıgöl and the castle
Balıklıgöl, in Eyyübiye south-west of the centre, is really two pools and the shrines around them. The legend says that when Nimrod had Abraham thrown into a fire, the flames became water and the logs became carp, which is why the fish are never eaten. The larger pool, Halilürrahman, 150 metres long, is lined by the Halilürrahman and Rızvaniye mosques and medreses; the medrese of 1775 ends in a domed room built out over the water, and the spring feeding the pools is believed to rise beneath it. The smaller Aynzeliha pool lies in front of the castle and is tied to Zeliha, Nimrod's daughter, who loved Abraham.
The castle on Damlacık hill has an outer circuit of four gates and an inner one of twenty-five towers. On top stand two columns with Corinthian capitals, put up between AD 240 and 242 under Manu IX, king of Edessa; popular belief makes the pair the catapult that hurled Abraham into the fire. The Urfa Man statue was found around this hill, and on its western slope the Kale Eteği necropolis has rock-cut chamber tombs of the 2nd to 6th centuries AD.
The museums
The Şanlıurfa Archaeology and Mosaic Museum, almost opposite Balıklıgöl, opened in its new complex on 24 May 2015. Its fourteen main halls run in order of time, from Palaeolithic finds to life-size Neolithic scenes, and the museum describes its 4.5-kilometre route as the longest in the country. Here are the Göbeklitepe reliefs of leopard, boar, stork and snake, a large model of the site, pieces from Nevalı Çori and the Balıklıgöl statue, which the museum calls the oldest known statue in the world. Its mosaic hall shows the Orpheus floor, smuggled out in the 1950s and recovered from the United States in 2012.
The Haleplibahçe Mosaic Museum keeps the floors of a Roman villa dug up between 2006 and 2008: four named Amazons hunting around a wounded lion, and a single panel following Achilles from his nurse's arms to his departure for Troy.
The City Museum fills a tower of the walls at Beykapısı from the time of the Crusader county; the municipality bought it in 2008 and shows a model of the city and holograms of the prophets linked to it. The Hacıbanlar house, restored in 2011, is a kitchen museum with costumed mannequins at work and cooking courses, and the Mahmut Nedim mansion of 1903 holds the War of Independence museum and a room for the singer Müslüm Gürses.
Mosques and former churches
The Great Mosque on Divanyolu Caddesi, probably Zengid work of 1170 to 1175, rose on the site of the Red Church, whose bell tower survives; local belief links the well in its prayer hall to the cloth Jesus sent to King Abgar. The Selahaddin Eyyubi Mosque replaced the church of John the Baptist raised by Bishop Nona in 457 and became a mosque in 1993; look for the coiled dragon reliefs by its windows. The Fırfırlı Mosque was the Church of the Twelve Apostles until 1956, the Nimetullah, or Ak, Mosque has the city's tallest minaret, and the Dabakhane Mosque of 1568 keeps the only mukebbire among Urfa's mosques.
Harran
Harran is identified with the Haran of the Torah, and the medieval historian Ibn Shaddad records it as the town where Abraham lived before Palestine. It grew rich where trade routes out of northern Mesopotamia crossed, and kept its worship of the moon, sun and planets into the eleventh century, long after Urfa turned Christian. On the mound stands what is left of the Great Mosque that Marwan II built between 744 and 750, which the provincial directorate calls the first monumental mosque in Anatolia. Around it are the kumbet houses, brick cones raised about 250 years ago from material taken from the ruins, cool in summer and warm in winter.
Halfeti and the countryside
Halfeti, on the Euphrates, lost three-fifths of its area under the Birecik dam reservoir in 2000. A boat trip of about an hour passes sunken houses and the minaret of drowned Savaşan village on the way to Rumkale, and the town is known for a black rose found nowhere else. Gölpınar Nature Park, closer to the city, is the province's main red pine wood and a picnic ground. Walkers can follow the Turkish section of Abraham's Path from Urfa or Harran, staying with village families, and in winter the Karacadağ ski centre near Siverek opens a single run from late November.
