URFA (SANLIURFA)
Sanliurfa is Turkey at its most Middle Eastern, with golden color stone houses, holy shrines filled with touring pilgrims, and an authentic bazaar showcasing mounds and mounds of the local work—crushed red pepper, in many shades and levels of spiciness. Earlier a sleepy and arid frontier town that underwent a huge boom due to GAP (the Guneydogu Anadolu Projesi, or Southeast Anatolia Project, a large-scale damming and flooding program undertaken by the Turkish government), Urfa has a long tale even by Turkish standards. For Muslims, Urfa is most popular as the supposed birthplace of the biblical patriarch Abraham. Half-dozen mosques gather around the cave where many Muslims think Abraham was born, and a pool near the cave is filled with what are considered to be sacred carp. Urfa is also the heartland of the unromantically fame Pre-Pottery Neolithic Era, a step of prehistory some 13,500 years ago when humankind was getting the first steps toward village and farming. In the Urfa Museum, you can view what is arguably the world's earliest statue and at nearby Göbekli Tepe you can see the earliest monumental construction.
Urfa is seldom known as Sanliurfa; Sanli, or "famous," was added by an act of government to the city's name in 1984 to memorialize the city's resistance to the French military control of the area resulting World War I. .Urfa's old town, at the southerly foot of Divan Caddesi, is an unusual mix of Byzantine, Arab, and Ottoman structure, albeit slowly eroded over the centuries.
Urfa is seldom known as Sanliurfa; Sanli, or "famous," was added by an act of government to the city's name in 1984 to memorialize the city's resistance to the French military control of the area resulting World War I. .Urfa's old town, at the southerly foot of Divan Caddesi, is an unusual mix of Byzantine, Arab, and Ottoman structure, albeit slowly eroded over the centuries.