Things to do
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Balıklıgöl
Two pools of sacred carp below the citadel, on the spot where tradition says Abraham was thrown into a fire that turned to water. The gardens around them are the city's centre of gravity and the fish are never taken.
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Göbekli Tepe
Circles of T-shaped limestone pillars carved with foxes, boars and cranes, raised around 9500 BC by people who had not yet started farming, and buried again by them. It is the oldest known monumental architecture in the world and is walked on a raised boardwalk under a canopy.
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Grand Mosque of Urfa
A twelfth-century mosque built on the site of a Byzantine cathedral, whose square bell tower was kept as the minaret and still carries a clock. The courtyard is shaded and used all day.
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Gümrük Han
The sixteenth-century caravanserai at the heart of the covered market, its courtyard given over to low stools and coffee under a mulberry tree. The lanes around it still trade in copper, felt, isot pepper and sheepskin.
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Harran
A town on the Syrian border inhabited for five thousand years, with the ruins of the first Islamic university, a crusader-period castle and the beehive mud houses that are still built here. Abraham is said to have lived here before Canaan.
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Karahan Tepe
A Neolithic site of the same culture as Göbekli Tepe, excavated since 2019, with a chamber of pillars cut from the bedrock and a human head carved from the rock wall. It is quieter and less finished than its neighbour.
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Şanlıurfa Archaeology and Mosaic Museum
The largest archaeological museum building in Turkey, opened in 2015, whose first hall holds the Urfa Man of about 9000 BC and pillars lifted from the Neolithic sites of the plain. The mosaic hall next door covers the Roman villa found at Haleplibahçe.
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Şanlıurfa Castle
The citadel on the cliff above the pools, with two Corinthian columns on its summit that the city calls the throne of Nimrod. The stair up from the gardens is long and the view takes in the whole old city.