The city of Prophets

With its millennia-old past, its traditional fabric and its living traces of ancient legends, Sanliurfa is a city that represents the history of civilization...

“More than three thousand years ago, far away in the distant east, in Mesopotamia, God spoke to a man who was living with his flocks: ‘Leave your land, your father and your family and go to the land that I will show you.” So begins the story of Abraham, Father of Prophets, in the book of Genesis. Abraham, of the lineage of Noah, who came with his father Terah from the city of Ur to settle in Harran, set out from here for the the ‘Promised Land’ of Canaan.

Şanlıurfa, known in ancient times first as Ur and later as Edessa, has a history dating back 9000 years. One of the oldest cities of the world, absolutely one should see . It was the birthplace of Abraham, the genetic father of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The city where Adam and Eve lived. The city where Moses lived. The city where Elijah lived. The city where Jethro lived. The city where Job lived,

It was in Sanliurfa that early Christians were first permitted to worship freely, and where the first churches were constructed openly. Pagan temples were converted to synagogues, synagogues to churches and churches to mosques, resulting in a uniquely eclectic architecture.

Ur, one of the earliest cities of Mesopotamian civilization, is situated near Basra at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. But it harbours in its history several more cities of the same name. The place in northern Mesopotamia known to the Aramaic tribes as Urhai, in other words today’s Sanliurfa, also appears in certain sources as the ‘Ur’ of ancient times

While it is not known to which place the Ur in Genesis refers, one thing is certain: Sanliurfa is a very old city, touched and hallowed by many prophets, with living traces of ancient legends, a vital traditional fabric, and a history stretching back thousands of years, a city that has opened its arms to a wide variety of cultures. And religions, too, of course... The celebrated 17th century Turkish traveler Evliya Çelebi describes the city as follows in 1650: “Urfa is one of the oldest cities to have been founded since the time of Noah and the Great Flood, the work of a ruler by the name of Rohai from the tribe of Semud (Semito-Aramaic). It was in this city that Nimrod tossed the Prophet Abraham into the fire. During Roman rule, Jesus came here and descended on a church, which they therefore they call the Church of the Messiah.” Together with the many holy places visited by Muslims, Christians and Jews along the pilgrimage route that has run since the oldest times to Mecca and Jerusalem, Urfa is truly, as is claimed, a ‘City of Prophets’.