City of Prophets — Göbekli Tepe, the Pool of Abraham, and Urfa kebab
Şanlıurfa (Urfa) claims to be the birthplace of the prophet Abraham and is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in Anatolia. The Pool of Abraham (Balıklıgöl), set in a walled garden of mosques and rose gardens, is home to sacred carp fed by the faithful as an act of piety. Twelve kilometres outside the city, Göbekli Tepe is the oldest known ceremonial structure on Earth — 12,000-year-old T-shaped megaliths carved with animals, built by hunter-gatherers 6,000 years before the pyramids — making Urfa the gateway to the world's oldest religion.
Urfa was known in antiquity as Edessa — a Hellenistic city-state that became one of the earliest Christian kingdoms (converting in the 2nd century CE, earlier than Rome). After Byzantine, Crusader, Mongol, and Ottoman rule, the 'Şanlı' (glorious) prefix was awarded by the Turkish parliament in 1984 for the city's resistance to French occupation in 1919–1920. Göbekli Tepe, just outside the city, has fundamentally rewritten the timeline of human civilization — the discovery that organized religious ritual predates agriculture by millennia changed archaeology's understanding of how civilization…