Harran and Sanliurfa

Imagine Abraham's herds grazing on this very spot thousands of years ago.

Of course, God told Abraham to separate himself from everything that was going on in Harran and to move to the land of Canaan. Maybe it was what was going on in the tents!

Rochelle, Martha, Selda, Duygu and Judy

On a serious note, it was mind-boggling to stand on land with such an ancient history and to think that this is the very spot Abraham's father settled with his family after leaving Ur. Today Harran is an impoverished mostly Arabic-speaking village. It's a tourist destination for several reasons. One is the presence of what is called the first "university" in the world. It was an eighth century mosque complex where astronomical research was carried out. Very little remains of the original structure and it is fenced off. Guidebooks say you can see remains of a pool and seats that were part of the Arab "university." There is an on-going excavation project nearby, fenced off with a barb-wired topped chain link fence. So at least someone is paying some attention to this place.

Ruins of Mosque and Arab University

Another reason tourists come here is to see the "beehive houses." These are only a couple hundred years only -- practically modern! They're all made from mud bricks. Actually the houses in the village are now interspersed with more modern dwellings, and the old beehives used mostly for animals or storage. This is probably not a bad thing because it was the mud brick construction that caused houses to collapse during the recent earthquake that took place not too far north of Harran.

Looking into the courtyard of one of the complexes of mud brick, beehive houses.

There are also ruins of an old Crusader castle. You can scramble around and it looks like it's been shored up here and there. But it's still pretty much just ruins. It was the Mongol's who laid waste to the city -- like many other place in Turkey. However, unlike other places in Turkey, Harran never recovered.

From Harran we drove back into Sanliurfa, a city of about 400,000 east of Gaziantep. It's said that Urfa is 40 percent Kurdish, but probably that's too high. There are also Arabic speakers living there. It has a very different feeling from Gaziantep, whose population had been 30-40 percent Armenian prior to the First World War. Urfa is know for religious conservatism. I don't know if it really is any more conservative than Gaziantep, but it certainly feels less "Western" than Gaziantep -- maybe you could use the work provincial. Sanliurfa's bazaars and narrow shopping streets are also much more interesting, somehow more "authentic." You just get the feeling you've crossed some sort of cultural line in moving east from Gaziantep to Sanliurfa.

We ate lunch in a two hundred-year-old house that had been built by a furrier. It was warm enough for us to eat on a second floor terrace. Very relaxing and the food was good.

Restaurant. You can see the terrace where we ate. And the trees had oranges on them.

Then we wandered through the streets and bazaars to the carp pond I described in my posting on the Mardin trip. Back then it was dark when we arrived. This trip we went on a warm Saturday afternoon and the whole area was packed.

Carp Pond

There are probably thousands of carp in that pond. You can buy fish food and feed them. As soon as you raise your arm, there is a feeding frenzy.

Try clicking on this. I tried to capture the mayhem that arises when the fish even think there's food around.

We walked to the top of the castle ruins on the hill behind the pond/park/mosque complex. We had a great view of the city. Since so many of the houses were built of the same sandstone as the surrounding hills (or are painted that color), parts of the city seem almost invisible. Of course they are building apartment building on the edge of town, but a good percentage of what you see seems old.

Castle in Sanliurfa

I do hope to come back. You can get to Urfa easily by public bus and there's lots to see that we didn't have time to see.