Sanfiurfa:

• Back lanes. More children brandishing shiny toy guns and real (and hefty) knives. They know the power of what they hold and the gestures that go with such weapons. Harmless theatrics that fell like they’re running along the edge of cold-hearted threats. A gray-haired man appears at a window and sends them off. They’re scurrying is that of nervous children.
• We've been out all day with Yusuf, a guide-driver, driving and walking to 6000 to 9000 year old dwelling sites along the Turkey-Syrian border and just north of Sanliurfa. The people here are Arabs and Kurds and, we are told, many are very poor. Along the way, we visit rocky fortress ruins, towns (some with underground houses), caravanseris. Astonishing places one after the other.
• Along the way, the landscape shifts between a moonscape of arid rock-stewn hills and large irrigated tracts of cotton, cereals, fruits, nuts and olives. The water is the result of the controversial dam and flooding projects, the same set of projects that has already flooded ancient dwelling areas and threatens places like Hasankeyf. Crossing these now fertile fields, we are told by our guide that otherwise impoverished poor people are happy to now have work planting and harvesting crops – but of course we don’t know what’s happening here, what people’s experiences are.
• The fortress ruins and beehive houses of old Harran, the ruins of a spice and slave trade kervansaray at Han-el-Ba’rűr, underground dwellings at Suab (banned by the government from habitation 60 years ago we are told, although I followed a woman and infant home and was invited into lived in underground chamber ), a moon and sun cult site at Soğmater, Syriac inscriptions across the rock surface, the sun goddess herself still peering across the arid hills. Harran, thought to be continuously inhabited for 6,000 years, referred to in Genesis, once a prosperous trading town and centre of worship of moon god Sin, later a Roman centre of learning, then home to a Crusader fortress, a Byzantine and Arab culture centre as well, finally sacked by the Mongols in the 13thC, then mostly leveled by an earthquake. Today red stone and tan marble fortress ruins sit scattered on an artificial tumulus, sometimes dwarfing the village of traditional beehive shaped homes (many still lived in, satellite dish sprouting from the red hives) and modern cottage houses. The Arabs and Kurds here, traditional herders, now mostly work as day labourers in the cotton and cereal fields wherever irrigation has become available. Yusuf says they are happy with this new life. We want second opinions.
• (A little snippet of that came on the fly today, October 8th, following protests (on the second anniversary of PKK opposition leader Abdullah Ocalan's detention) in southeastern Turkey where we’ve just been. The BBC site has this: The PKK's current tactics are to follow Ocalan's lead in pressing for moderate concessions to Turkey's Kurdish community. The BBC's Chris Morris in Istanbul says the main problem the authorities face is that two years after Ocalan's capture they have done nothing to fulfil their promise of improving economic conditions in the south-east of the country.
• A lasting memory: - I ask an Arab girl, perhaps 10 or 11, the way back through the hives to our car. She obliges, tagging along and urging me to buy, as other children have done on the tumulus, a simple beaded decoration she carries. Her approach is gentle, her voice soft. Her 20 or so English words, offered like a liturgy, are used up in a moment. Within a beehive I’ve fallen for her completely and she likely knows it. I ask to clarify where the car might be and then turns us into another lane. She and I hang behind the others, I try to reason as gently as her that her decoration is indeed very nice but that I don’t want it, I tell her that she has a beautiful smile (which I truly mean, trying to be convincing, to connect, by touching her shoulder), even if (or perhaps especially because) her easy smile is framed in a head of stiff dry, dusty, even filthy sun-bleached hair … all this, absurdly, in English. Was she imagining that she was making progress, which she was. When the others are gone, I give her the lira she’s wanted for the decoration, telling to keep the curio itself. She beams, gives a quick affirmative yelp, then turns and hops and skips away, looking over her shoulder once and twice more, smiling, waving. Whatever has happened, we’re both happier for it.
• Another lingering memory: - Yusuf has been breaking into song over the day. He’s not forthcoming about the meaning of the verses, but his voice is all energy, wonderful. Then once – as we are deep inside a cavernous, now unused marble quarry, soaring shadowy walls and arches of dusty rose, ivory, cream and browns stretching above and beneath us – Yusuf’s powerful voice suddenly bursts across the quarry, resounding from wall to wall to wall, calling, coaxing, urging, I’m not sure which, but sounding passionate, lyrical, urgent, primal and glorious.
• Gobekli Tepe. This is an archaeological site I have especially wanted to reach - which we did at sunset. Gobekli Tepe: navel or belly of the mountain, sitting atop the highest point of land as far as the eye can see, some 9,000 years old and claimed to be the oldest site of ceremonies so far discovered anywhere. Walking around the site you see unearthed circles of t-shaped pillars arranged around even larger pillars, some five metres high, each decorated, at a closer look, with exquisite images of stork-like birds, wild boars, a lion in full relief creeping down the edge of one pillar, wolf-like creatures and other animals.
• Another day, back in Sanliurfa, late afternoon, standing high atop the citadel or kale overlooking the city. Betty and I have been counting the minarets, some 45 to 65, when prayers break out, a kind of pandemonium of praises reverberating all around us and off into the hot, hazy horizon from Gobekli Tepe to the Mesopotamian plains.
• Immediately below us, down the cliffside, stretches Golbasi, a series of mosques, caves, rose gardens and arcaded rectangular pools, restful and beautiful, where pilgrims come to pray at Islamic prophet Abraham/Ibrahim’s cave. The story we read is worth re-telling. Ibrahim was in Urfa destroying pagan gods when Nimrod, the local Assyrian king, took offence and had him immolated on a funeral pyre. Seeing this, God turned the fire into water and the hot coals into fish. Ibrahim himself was then hurled off the cliff (where we have been listening to the 40-60 calls to prayer) into a bed of roses – likely badly scratched but smelling good. It’s the cave where he then hung out that people come to pray, as well as watch and feed the sacred carp (the fiery coals) swimming in the pools and along the connecting channels.