Saliurfa (Urfa) is at the centre of an area crammed full of history and historic sites.
Sanliurfa, often simply known as Urfa in daily language, in ancient times Edessa, is a city with 482,323 inhabitants in south-eastern Turkey, and the capital of Sanliurfa Province. Urfa is situated on a plain under big open skies, about eighty kilometres east of the Euphrates River. The climate features extremely hot, dry summers and cool, moist winters.
The city has been known by many names in history. For a while it was named Callirrhoe or Antiochia on the Callirhoe . During Byzantine rule it was named Justinopolis. Prior to Turkish rule, it was often best known by the name given it by the Seleucids Edessa.
Sanli means "great, glorious, dignified" in Turkish, and Urfa was officially renamed Sanliurfa (Urfa the Glorious) by the Turkish Grand National Assembly in 1984, in recognition of the local resistance in the Turkish War of Independence. The title was achieved following repeated requests by the city's members of parliament, desirous to earn a title similar to those of neighbouring rival cities 'Gazi' (veteran) Antep and 'Kahraman' (Heroic) Maras.
The history of Sanliurfa is recorded from the 4th century BC, but may date back further, when there is ample evidence for the surrounding sites at Duru, Harran and Nevali Cori. It was one of several cities in the Euphrates-Tigris basin, the cradle of the Mesopotamian civilization. According to Turkish Muslim traditions Urfa (its name since Byzantine days) is the biblical city of Ur, due to its proximity to the biblical village of Harran. However, some historians and archaeologists claim the city of Ur is in southern Iraq. Urfa is also known as the birthplace of Job. The Bible specifically states "Ur of the Chaldees" as the place Abraham was called from. It is unlikely that we would have been "called" to make a journey so short as the one from Urfa to Harran where his father, Terah, died. Abraham most likely was born in the area around Harran as his family remained here, and Terah returned to Harran to die. According to the Bible, the family were involved in stock rearing and, possibly, other farming. So what kind of trade it was that took Terah, Abraham and Sarah south down the Eurphrates to the seaport of Ur is unknown. However, many people were involved in various kinds of trade around the Fertile Crescent.
According to tradition, Nimrod (who ruled Chaldea, likely including Ur of the Chaldees) had Abraham immolated on a funeral pyre, but God turned the fire into water and the burning coals into fish. The pool of sacred fish remains to this day.
Urfa was conquered repeatedly throughout history, and has been dominated by many civilizations, including the Ebla, Akkadians, Sumerians, Babylonians, Hittites, Hurri-Mitannis (Armeno-Aryans), Armenians, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Medes, Persians, Macedonians (under Alexander the Great), Seleucids, Arameans, Osrhoenes, Romans, Sassanids, Byzantines, and Crusaders.
In the Byzantine period Edessa was a powerful regional centre with churches, schools and monasteries.
Islam first arrived around 638 CE, when the Rashidun army conquered the region without a fight. Islam was then established permanently in Urfa by the empires of the Ayyubids, Seljuks and Ottoman Turks. In the aftermath of the First Crusade, the city was the center of the Crusader County of Edessa, until 1144, when it was again captured by the Turk Zengui, and most of its inhabitants were slaughtered together with the Latin archbishop. For the ten years following the Turkish capture, Urfa was at the center of European history, since the very reason for which the Second Crusade was launched was the city's recapture. While it began with an enthusiastic massacre of Jews in western Europe and the presence of an Emperor and a King of France gave it much lustre, it was a disaster, its only success recorded resulting from auxiliary operation when an English fleet took from the Arabs and passed into the hands of the future King of Portugal the city of Lisbon.
Under the Ottomans, Urfa was a centre of trade in cotton, leather, and jewellery. There were three Christian communities: Syrian, Armenian, and Latin. According to Lord Kinross, 8,000 Armenians were massacred in Urfa in 1895. The last Syrian Christians left in 1924 and went to Aleppo (where they settled down in a place that was later called Hay al-Suryan "The Syriac Quarter").
In 1914 Urfa was estimated to have 75,000 inhabitants: 15,000 Kurds and 30,000 Turks, 25,000 Armenians and 5,000 Syrian Christians. There was also a Jewish presence in the town, most of whom fled to Istanbul, Egypt and other countries due to anti-semitism.
At the end of World War I, with the Ottoman Empire defeated, and European armies attempting to grab parts of Anatolia, first the British and then the French occupied Urfa. The British occupation of the city of Urfa started de facto on 7 March 1919 and officially as of 24 March 1919, and lasted till 30 October 1919. French forces took over the next day and their uncomfortable presence, met by outbursts of resistance, lasted until 11 April 1920, when they were defeated by local resistance forces (the new Turkish government in Ankara not being established, with the National Assembly declared on 23 April 1920.
The French retreat from the city of Urfa was conducted under an agreement reached between the occupying forces and the representatives of the local forces, commanded by Captain Ali Saip Bey assigned from Ankara. The withdrawal was meant to take place peacefully, but was disrupted by an ambush on the French by irregular forces at the Sebeke Pass on the way to Syria, leading to 296 casualties among the French, and more among the ambushers.
