The conical domed houses of Harran, the kumbet houses, stand in the Harran district of Şanlıurfa. They were built about 250 years ago from bricks gathered at the Harran archaeological site, and although similar houses can be found in villages of the Suruç and Birecik countryside, what distinguishes those at Harran is the use of brick in the roofing.
Each house is built by corbelling brick over a square or nearly square prismatic base, tapering as it rises, reaching up to five metres inside and laid in thirty to forty courses of brick. Rose oil, straw, fired earth and egg white went into the mortar, and the combination of that construction and those materials keeps the houses cool in summer and warm in winter; plastering with mud inside and out is what has allowed them to survive. The houses were registered in 1979 as an archaeological and urban conservation area, and Harran, which has kept this singular form of vernacular architecture alive, has been on the UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List since 2000.
When to go
- Climate
- Across Şanlıurfa as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from 5.7 °C in January to 32.1 °C in July; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in April, May and October; rainfall is heaviest in January (85 mm) and lightest in July (2 mm). Long-term means for 1929-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
