2025 - Fall in Europe

Leaving Mardin this morning, our destination was the archaeological site of Gobeklitepe.  On the way there, the road took us through desolate countryside, rural villages with goats, sheep and donkeys wandering around, and through agricultural land with fields of corn and cotton plus groves of walnut and olive trees.   Mardin in the distance Cotton fields Before starting this vacation, I had watched several YouTube videos about the site and had read some articles.  The following is an except from what I read: For years, it was believed civilization began with the Sumerians but an ancient site in Turkey challenges everything that was known.  Discovered in 1994, Göbekli Tepe is over 11,600 years old – thousands of years before Sumer!  This mysterious temple complex, buried beneath the earth for millennia, features enormous 20-ton limestone pillars arranged in intricate circles.  However, here’s the real mystery:         Who built it?...

Our next stop on this journey through eastern Turkey was Mardin.  The town is known for its strategic location on a rocky hill near the Tigris River and for its fascinating architecture: heavily decorated stone buildings cascading down a mountain, overlooking the vast expanse of the Mesopotamian plains below.  We are staying at the Artuklu Kervansarayi Hotel.  It is a large stone complex on the side of the hill and was built originally as a caravansary.   Mardin lies at the heart of the homeland of the Assyrians (also Syriacs), an ancient people who trace their origin to the Akkadian Empire, established in Mesopotamia around 2200 BC.  Syriac is a Semitic language directly related to the native tongue of Jesus Christ, Aramaic.  Syriac Orthodoxy was established after one of the earliest divisions in Christianity in the 5th century, much earlier than the Great Schism of the 11th century between the churches of Rome and Constantinople. While the Syr...