Living History: Urfa, Mardin, and Southeast Turkey

This will be my longest post yet. We spent four non-stop days touring the Southeast of Turkey, which is significant for its large Kurdish population and for its proximity to Syria. We flew into Urfa on Friday afternoon, met our driver and guide for the day, and immediately drove to Göbekli Tepe. Göbekli Tepe was only discovered in 1996 but is over 11,600 years old (thousands of years older than Stonehenge!), which makes it the world’s oldest known temple. It’s made up of multiple circular groupings of limestone pillars that have animal and human figures carved into them.

I didn’t get the best pictures of the stones because a temporary wooden structure had just been built to protect Göbekli Tepe from the sun and elements (it was buried for thousands of years before being found in the 90’s) and probably to protect the archaeologists that are still excavating more temples from the 110+ degree heat.

Next we drove to a small nearby village to tour some of the beehive houses the area is famous for.

And also the ruins of an old Umayyad madrasah (university) which the mongols looted and burned down (this was a common theme at sites throughout the trip).

After lunch back in Urfa we drove to our hotel, dropped our bags off, and began to wander the old section of the city. We saw fish lake, were Abraham is said to have landed after being thrown off the mountain and into a fire by King Nimrod

                                                               (mountain/roman fortification)

                                                                         (fish lake)

As well as the cave where Abraham was born.

We walked around Urfa after a late dinner and came across a Ramadan festival in downtown. The city is much more crowded at night (wonder if that has anything to do with the 110+ heat and not being able to eat or drink water all day??)

                                                               ( abandoned gardens of Urfa)

Day two started with a drive along the Turkey/Syria border to Mardin, a very interesting city that is applying for UNESCO world heritage site status.  

The border is more of a neutral zone, with fences on the Turkish and Syrian side separated by a large mine field. We did not see any evidence of any conflict spillover since ISIS is mostly near the Syrian border with Iraq.  The road itself is part of the route Silk Road travelers would have taken. We saw the large man made hills constructed by travelers as landmarks so they wouldn’t get lost on this part of the journey (the desert landscape looks the same in all directions here)

                                       (Minefield in the no man's land between Syria and Turkey)

In Mardin, we met up with our new guide, Mesut Alp, who is a local archaeologist/filmmaker/community leader and all around most interesting man in Turkey. Many of the sites we visited with Mesut in the next few days were archaeological sites that he had discovered himself. His historical knowledge of the area and ruins was incredible and was made even more so by comments like, “My friends, over there in that cave I found 20 people buried with all their weapons and loot from the war between (insert historical factions here) and it is now the oldest known soldier burial complex in the world,” or something to that general effect. We visited so many ruins of such age that now for me to consider something truly “ancient” it must be at least 5,000 years old. And what’s even more amazing is that we are some of the first people to ever see these ruins.  They've only been discovered in the last few decades and most are still being excavated (mostly by Mesut). I remarked more than once that had these ruins been in Rome or Greece or an area more prone to tourist traffic, there is no way we would be climbing over and through them as we did. We would be observing them as tourists in the future most likely will, from behind ropes so as not to disturb them. We took our privilege seriously and made sure not to cause any damage to our surroundings, but being some of the first people to walk on the same streets and bridges and entering the same tombs and temples as people from thousands of years ago was unforgettable.

(Pictures of the Ancient city of Dara, built by the Romans and captured later by the Persians. Our guide Mesut is explaining the significance of the text carved into a slab of limestone. You can barely make out the earliest version of the Christian Cross on the leftmost portion of the limestone.)

(Ancient agora of Anastasiopolis. Below is the ruins of a bridge, a tower, and a cistern)

My hotel room in Mardin was easily the coolest one I’ve ever stayed in. The stone work on the ceiling was incredible, it had its own ancient cistern, and best of all Air Conditioning. (best night’s sleep since I’ve been in Turkey!)

(you can see the stairs down into the cistern in the back left of the picture)

                                   (View of the plains of Mesopotamia from our hotel balcony.)

On Sunday we visited Mesut’s hometown and a Syriac Christian church, Mor Yacob (Mor means saint). The family that lives next door and maintains the church is one of the last Syriac Christians in the area and they were nice enough to give us a tour (And of course, Mesut was doing excavation work in the gardens surrounding the church so he gave us a lot of history as well). Mesut also asked the father to speak to his son in Aramaic, the language Jesus would have spoken when alive which has all but disappeared now, so that we could hear it.

                                                               (Part of Mesut's excavations)

           (Tomb of St. Jacob, one of the attendees of the council of Nicaea, in the church's catacombs)

This was also the closest we got to the Syrian border.

                                  (“Point Zero” border crossing between Syria and Turkey.)

We had lunch at the coolest riverside restaurant. It was basically the beach for landlocked southeastern Turkey, with kids running around and splashing in the water and a swimming area (for men only) at the entrance to the park. We sat on piles of cushions on top of wooden pallets that had been built out over the river and had some of the best food of the trip so far.

After lunch we had tea with a retired member of the Turkish Grand National Assembly who also happens to be Kurdish. This was unplanned, Mesut just wondered over to us with a man in a bright bathing suit in tow and said, “My friends, this is my good friend and very important Kurdish politician that has agreed to speak with us.” It was kind of an informal question and answer session about Kurdish life and their future political goals. Very interesting.

Monday was another full day, heading first to one of two Syriac Christian monasteries we would see that day.

Stopped for lunch in Mediyat, a town known for its silver and apparently Mesopotamian wine. Bought two bottles to try, (hopefully one of them will make it back to the states!) but didn’t buy any jewelry because there was too much to look at during our short stop over there (sorry everybody). Our big group also attracted the most attention of any visit thus far (a small group of local kids attached themselves to us as soon as we got off the bus and by the time we left there must have been at least 24).

After lunch it was off to the second monastery of the day. It was the most intact, having not been completely ransacked by either the Mongols or the Persians or some other war prone empire.

                                                 (Oldest tile mosaic ceiling in Turkey)

Next was Hasankeyf, an ancient city built on the banks of the Tigris River (we also drove over the Euphrates River a few times around Urfa).

We waked down a steep hill to get our feet wet in the famous river and admire the ruins of an old roman bridge.

(You can just make out the 3 columns of the bridge in front of the mountain. Those are just the supports; the actual bridge was made of wood planks so they could be taken up if the city was attacked)

There were also some very cool dwellings carved into the side of the mountains all around Hasankeyf.

The sad part is that most of what you see in these picture will be underwater in a year. The Turkish government has been working on a dam nearby and when it’s completed the water level in Hasankeyf will be so high that everything in the pictures that’s under the top of the minaret will be submerged. So we were some of the first people to see the ancient ruins and temples of Göbekli Tepe in thousands of years, and we are some of the last people to see the ruins of Hasankeyf for potentially thousands of years, if it ever resurfaces.

After skipping some stones on the Tigris, we drove to Batman (yes, you read that right) to have dinner and fly back to Istanbul. The signs we saw in this city were pretty great: “Batman University,” “Batman Airport,” and even a “Batman Land”

It was a late flight back to the airport on the Asian side of Istanbul, and an even longer bus ride from there back to campus. We saw so much it was impossible for me to include everything here, but I won’t be forgetting this trip any time soon.