The Best of Wanderlust (A GeoEx eBook)

The Best of Wanderlust

West of Eden: Turkey’s Archaeological Treasures

~~ Beyond the realm of legend, something was found here in 1993 which I find even more miraculous. That year, an excavation was allowed on the sacred space. Although no remains were found from the time of the patriarchs, a statue was uncovered that dates back almost 12,000 years, to the time of Gobekli Tepe. That statue is now on view in Urfa’s new museum. To get there from the carp-filled pool, I had to thread through a maze of busy alleys, the city’s tight-packed bazaar. Here were stalls hung with long garlands of sun-dried tomatoes, peppers, and chilies and heaped with sacks of herbs and spices. Some of these were familiar—black smoked paprika, for instance—while others were mixed into the unexpected combinations that give the local cuisine its distinct flavors. I passed traders speaking in tones as silken as the scarves around their necks, then settled in one of the small café-stalls that serve one of the city’s specialties, Çiğ köfte , ground raw meat, often eaten wrapped in a lettuce leaf. Even here, among the traders, Abraham’s influence endures. The man who brought me a dish of this spiced delicacy told me I would need a glass of drinking yoghurt to ease the heat of the chilies. As I ate and drank, he explained that the dish was created on the day that Nimrod tried to kill Abraham the patriarch. “Because all the wood in the city had been used on the burning pyre,” he said, eyes fixed on mine, “one enterprising cook had the idea to mince the fresh meat and then mix in some tomatoes, spices, and onion….” More certain is the story of that statue excavated near Abraham’s Pool in 1993, which now stands in the city’s treasure-packed museum. Urfa Man, as the figure is known, is the world’s oldest life-size human sculpture. He stands over six feet tall, and was carved from a single block of limestone around the time, some eleven thousand years ago, when

that Urfa has had many lives. It was founded—or perhaps re- founded—in 303 BCE by Seleucus, one of Alexander the Great’s generals, who settled the place with Macedonian veterans. The Macedonians called it Edessa after their hometown. Some five hundred years later Edessa was of sufficient importance to the Romans for their emperor, Valerian, to march an army here to fight the Persians, and of sufficient importance to the Persians for them to meet the enemy with a huge force. In the ensuing battle, Emperor Valerian was taken captive and never heard of again. Jump forward eight hundred years, to the 11th century, when the Crusaders recognized the strategic importance of Edessa and created a stronghold here, fortifying the hilltop and creating the County of Edessa, the first Crusader state in the Holy Land. These historical facts have played a role, but Urfa’s character has been even more significantly shaped by legend. It is said that this was the birthplace of the patriarch Abraham/Ibrahim, even though Ur, in Iraq, has a more convincing claim. It was from here that the patriarch is said to have driven his herds south to Harran and on towards the Holy Land. That story clashes with another which says that a local ruler named Nimrod had Abraham placed on a burning pyre and then ordered the entire flaming mass to be catapulted off the hillside between two massive columns—the two columns that can still be seen from the city below. They say that water sprang up where the holy man landed and a lake was created. In it, pieces of burning wood became sacred carp. Time has further embellished the story and fixed the site so that if you go there now you will see, as I did, a cave, part of a functioning 12th-century mosque, which you will be told is the site of the patriarch’s birth. Around the pool with its sacred carp, hawkers sell fish food so that believers—and the ones I saw had come from across the Middle East and beyond—can feed the miraculous creations.

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