As I climbed the slope toward one of the world’s most important ruins in a December rainstorm, a futuristic shape loomed into view. It was a swooping white canopy built over the main excavation site of Göbekli Tepe, a group of Neolithic structures in southeastern Turkey dating back up to 11,400 years. Their excavation in the mid-1990s prompted a rethinking of the standard chronology of human civilization. From beneath a space-age canopy, my partner Anya and I gazed like awe-struck, slightly frightened time travelers at the monumental Stone Age panorama before us.
Inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2018, Göbekli Tepe (Pot-bellied Hill) has spawned a sensational Netflix show and some of the silliest speculation. Recently, the ruins and their mysteries have attracted record numbers of visitors to this site near the regional capital Sanliurfa on the border with Syria, reaching 850,000 in 2022. The February earthquake that devastated other parts of Turkey caused minimal damage to the ruins. Reopened in April.
A short flight from Istanbul, Sanliurfa is an ancient Mesopotamian Silk Road city steeped in multicultural traditions and history, with important religious pilgrimage sites, a vibrant culinary scene and a historic bazaar district where Kurdish, Arabic and Turkish languages reverberate.
Cities are also the palincest of civilization. Under the Arameans it was called Urhai. Edessa under Alexander the Great, Romans, Byzantines, and Arabs. It was later renamed Urfa by the Ottomans in 1607. The honorary title Sanli, which means “glory” in Turkish, was awarded to him in 1984 for his heroic deeds in the Turkish War of Independence, but locals still refer to him as Urfa. .
This history was explained to us by our tour guide, Emine Yesim Bedrek. He is a feisty former assistant professor of English literature at Bingol University in Turkey, hired through his boutique agency Istanbul Tour Studio. She picked us up from the Tessera Hotel in the Eyubiye area of Sanliurfa. Originally an Armenian monastery built of the ubiquitous local limestone, Tessera, which opened in 2021, is one of many atmospheric small hotels in the neighborhood, most of them 19th-century Konak It is a renovated Ottoman mansion.
“Our Urfa is famous as the city of prophets like Abraham and Job,” Dr. Bedrek begins, en route to dinner in the vast courtyard of the centuries-old Ottoman inn. It is now a restaurant called Jevahir. Mr. Han. It is run by Cevahir Asman Yazmachi, the granddaughter of a prominent Kurdish tribal leader and a pioneering female entrepreneur in this patriarchal culture.
Southeastern Turkey is the birthplace of kebabs, and soon our table was filled with platters of Urfa’s signature patrican kebab, a hand-chopped local lamb patty sandwiched between pieces of eggplant. “Our eggplant varieties are certified,” Dr. Bedrek said. “It’s very long and thin, and it grows on the banks of the Euphrates,” she added poetically. “And the pepper here is divine,” she says of Urfa, a glossy, aromatic and spicy local variety that is eaten grilled with most meals and also dried into smoky flakes called isotto. declared about biver.
The next morning we wind our way through Eyubiyeh towards one of Urfa’s great religious treasures, the Lake of Abraham. On the way, Anya made a beeline for Charsi Filin. It’s a communal oven, where customers wait by the window with pots of Urfa’s glossy peppers and eggplant, and return with chewy flatbreads from the charcoal-fired and wood-fired stone ovens. I was waiting for it to come. Dr. Bedrek said these inexpensive hearths are a staple of the city, and real estate ads often list how close a place is to one.
Revered not only by Muslims but also historically by Christians and Jews, the lyrically beautiful Lake of Abraham (or Balikli Gol, or Lake of Fish in Turkish) is a place where the prophet Abraham, in legend, It shows the place where it was thrown onto the blazing fire by Nimrod from the nearby Damrasik Hill. The idolatrous king of Assyria asked God to turn fire into water and burning logs into carp. As we strolled around a large rectangular stone pond where pilgrims and tourists used to feed the plump sacred fish, Dr. Bedrek reiterated the details.
The poolside features the picturesque repeating arches of the 18th-century Rizvaniye Mosque and its madrasa. Couples were posing everywhere in gaudy Ottoman-era rental costumes, and despite my protests, Anya pressured me to dress up as well. After enduring the ordeal, we made our way to the small miraculous pond. There, Nimrod’s daughter Zelihah herself was thrown into the fire for supporting Abraham’s beliefs. Just beyond is the Dergar complex, which consists of a park, a rose garden, and a small cave where a mosque is worshiped. It is believed that Abraham was born here and hid from Nimrod during his childhood. Inside, pious people drank holy spring water and prayed silently.
Urfa’s bazaar, parts of which date back more than five centuries, is nearby. It is truly a collection of bazaars, bustling with small shops, alleys and crowded passageways, relieved by Ottoman courtyards.
Villagers come from the countryside to buy everything from wedding fabric to gold, knives, watermelons and handmade cradles. “Kurds from the north of the city and Arabs from the south,” Dr. Bedrek explained. “And they dress up for the trip.”
Around us, middle-aged Kurdish men in traditional baggy trousers, lavender and checked headdresses trailing behind tight-fitting gray jackets, milled about. Arab girls in shimmering dark gowns and hijabs passed others in floral headscarves and azure and gold gowns.
In the textile sector, we learned that the most-demanded fabrics come from Korea and Dubai. Elsewhere, pigeons cooed in their cages—“Urfa men are crazy about pigeons,” Dr Bedrec said. Coppersmiths’ streets sparkled with the sound of tuk-tuk-tuks’ hammers. And Anya’s bags were growing heavy with jars of sarka (a local high-octane dried chilli paste) and Urfa’s prized clarified sheep’s butter.
In the grand courtyard of Gumluk Khan, built during the reign of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent in the 16th century, we refueled with menengik, a milky hot drink made from ground wild pistachios. We then headed to a covered bazaar that specializes in carpets. There, an elderly Arab man wearing a regal black cloak, like the gown of an English barrister, was rummaging. These were once handmade from leather. Unfortunately, they are all made of polyester now.
nightlife sampling
Alcohol is hard to find in this conservative Muslim city, but we ate dinner that night, incredibly, at Mandelion, a relatively new meyhane (tavern) near our hotel. Under a pomegranate tree in the chic, festive courtyard of a 19th-century house, at a table covered in a mosaic of vibrant garlic dips, we sipped raki, a Turkish aniseed-flavored liquor, followed by sizzling fried liver. There was laughter and the clinking of glasses all around. “Can you believe this is happening in what may be the driest city in Turkey?” Anya said to Yakup, Dr. Bedrek’s learned Kurdish husband and guide at dinner with us. “Urfa needs a meyhane culture,” declared Furkan Saracoglu, the 28-year-old co-owner. “Especially now, with all the tourists from Göbekli Tepe coming to drink.”
We could have happily lingered and tempered our excitement. But what awaited us was Shira Gesesi, literally “Night of Turns.” Urfa is a phenomenal musical city, historically all-male, known for its traditional music, conversation, recitations, and gatherings where the ritual of making and eating sigköfte, spicy raw meat, and bulgur pâté takes place. . A larger, noisier tourist version has recently been created, and women are welcome too. We were soon seated on cushions at a long, low table in the large, bright salon of the Sehr-i Urfa restaurant, which opened in 2021. Tobacco kofte is completed. But the string band did well. As the highly enthusiastic singer and his powerful drummer work the crowd, Anya declares that maybe she doesn’t need alcohol after all.
Explore Göbekli Tepe
The next morning, the Bedreks drove us dozens of miles through the drizzle to the top of a stony hill. And there we were, under a space-age canopy, admiring a dusty beige Neolithic panorama. There are four open, circular limestone enclosures surrounded by T-shaped anthropomorphic boulders (the largest 18 feet tall), some of which contain wild animals and long human figures. There were also megaliths decorated with carvings of arms.
Excavations at Göbekli Tepe, currently believed to be home to the world’s oldest monumental communal building, began in 1995 under the direction of German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt. Dating to around 9,400 B.C., the site overturns conventional archaeological wisdom that such structures require a sedentary, agricultural family society. Schmidt found no traces of domestic settlements. He called Göbekli Tepe a “cathedral” of pilgrimage and asserted that “first the temple was built, then the city.”
Mysteries and questions have swirled ever since, and Dr. Bedrek reenacted some of them along the visitor’s path. How was the knowledge to build Göbekli Tepe acquired in a bolt from the blue in prehistoric times? Why was the monumental enclosure ultimately purposefully buried? Why then? Could a small, primitive version of it have been built on the slope just above?
Schmidt’s reputation came into question shortly after his death in 2014. Eventually, habitation structures were discovered in 2015 and 2016. Nearby, another shelter canopy covered an extensive group built and inhabited by sedentary hunter-gatherers.
And what about that awesome T-pillar enclosure?
The site’s research coordinator, Lee Clare of the German Archaeological Institute, later said by phone that they are now the settlement’s “special buildings, multi-purpose social spaces for rituals and sharing a common identity.” He said it was considered.
“Something like the prehistoric Sira Gesisi?” I suggested. “Why not?” Dr. Clare said, laughing. “They had drums and flutes.”
He stressed that Göbekli Tepe is not a temple in our sense of the word. This touched on what he called the biggest problem: “crazy” media speculation and false reporting. Göbekli Tepe was neither the so-called “zero point of civilization” nor the “decisive blow.” It was best understood as his one outstanding expression of an important Early Neolithic cultural network. As for purposeful burial, this was a known practice at the time, although it is now suggested that it may have been the result of a natural phenomenon.
In addition, there are many monuments in and around this site that are candidates for excavation. Göbekli Tepe is one of more than a dozen megalith-rich sites that make up the new Tas Tepela archaeological project around Urfa. Karakhantepe, about an hour to the east, may be a bit older. It features an impressive open room lined with phallic columns and human stone faces eerily rising from the surrounding walls.
We drove back to Urfa and had lunch at the brand new Göbekli Tepe Gastronomy Center, which the city operates in a modern district. The menu has been researched in local home kitchens and is offered at affordable prices for locals. But the interior is surprisingly extravagant, and we ate lamb soup and plump dolma under the stars and under the impressive abstract mural on the T-pillar.
On our final day, we visited the city’s magnificent Sanliurfa Archaeological Museum. The museum features a life-size replica of Göbeklitepe’s largest and most extraordinary building that you can walk through, as well as his 11,000-year-old ‘Urfa’, the world’s oldest known life-size human statue. Man. ” The adjacent dramatic Haleprivahce Mosaic Museum contains haunting floor mosaics of a Roman villa built in 194 AD. Both museums suffered earthquake damage and are under restoration. However, their treasures are 12 We hope to see them return to Urfa’s feeding grounds by the end of the month.
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