Nov 16 - Race to eat breakfast at 8:00, pack up, and hit the streets soon after. It rained all night and is still doing so now. Find a taxi and go the ten minutes to the otogar. The taxi driver, like some others we’ve had in Türkiye, is polite and gracious. All of them use a taxi meter, the readout of which is visible in the corner of their rear view mirror. A 10-15 minute ride is usually about $3.50.
Stand around at the station, but our bus does not show up. A man approaches, asks where we are going, and motions us to follow. Along with a number of other passengers, we go with him out the front door of the station and across the street to stand at a nearby petrol station. Within one minute, our bus arrives, parks by the pumps, and we all get on. It seems a bit confused, but we are on our way soon enough. I’m glad we weren’t already on the bus and disembarking here, as that would have disorienting.
All morning there is low fog and rain, as we pass low hills and continued croplands. This time, are on the main highway and see the Birecik dam on the Euphrates.
Off at Şanliurfa, or ‘Urfa’ as everyone calls it. It is raining hard and the power is off in the bus terminal. I buy an onward bus ticket for our next trip in three days, while a man at the ticketing counter next to me is seized by police and put in handcuffs. There is a lot of yelling but I can’t determine what he did.
Find a taxi and make our way into the warren of little streets in the old part of the city. Even though the hotel is tucked down a tiny alley we find it without any trouble. It is in a very old building, with thick stone walls. The kind of room Odette can jump around in and not bother the people on the floor below.
It is cold and wet on the streets of Urfa. We find a lonely restaurant and eat the standard offerings we see nearly every day. I need to get work done so we retreat to the room.
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It may sound like a broken record after Gaziantep, but Urfa is also considered to be one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. In summary, there is some good evidence backing that up. Along with places like Damascus, the archaeological finds point to paleolithic settlements, and insofar as the invention of ‘towns’ or ‘cities’ is concerned, large groups appear to have not lived together before that. I will discuss this a bit more tomorrow.
At any rate, it was part of many empires, conquered by Alexander the Great, and named Edessa by the Seleucids after that. It was a battleground city between the Romans and Parthians (and later the Sassanids), and absorbed by the Arab invasions from 639 CE. It was taken by the Crusaders for about 50 years, but otherwise has stayed in Muslim hands since (unless you want to count the brief occupation by British and French forces after WWI).
Türkiye III