Home » Turkey » Relgious tones, and sad going homes

Well, after our rest in Goreme, we finally managed to pull ourselves away, and plunge into Turkeys least visited region, South-East Anatolia, aka Kurdestan. The area is overwhelmingly Kurdish, with a couple of noticable Arab pockets, as you'll see. Turkish is spoken rarely here, as with English.
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Relgious tones, and sad going homes

Conor_purcell
2005-11-18 14:00:56

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Well, after our rest in Goreme, we finally managed to pull ourselves away, and plunge into Turkeys least visited region, South-East Anatolia, aka Kurdestan. The area is overwhelmingly Kurdish, with a couple of noticable Arab pockets, as you'll see. Turkish is spoken rarely here, as with English.

Our first port of call was Mt. Nemrut, the image of which currently dominates the front of all the Turkish guidebooks. Again, I was determined not to take a tour up the mountain, but unfortunately we arrived in Kahta, the base town, on a Sunday when no Dolmuses go there. So with great reluctance we took a tour at roughly 35 EURO each, and were rewarded with an entertaining guide and a few 'bonus' sights.

Over 2000 years ago, the local King of the region, Antiochus, signed a peace deal with the Romans, and his kingdom prospered. At the peak of his power, he ordered the building of a temple on top of Mt. Nemrut, and with it, statues of him 'hanging out' with the Gods (e.g. Hercules and those lads). The ruins were only discovered in 1881, and have only become a tourist attraction in the last couple of decades. The views from the peak our outstanding, and our tour was timed to coincide the the setting sun. The statues themselves, or rather the heads of the statues, sit facing East and West, with the burial mound in the middle. Despite the presence of 150+ other tourists, I was well impressed - there's definately something weird and cool about those heads. With no camera, however, Charlene took care of the pictures.

I replaced the lost camera in Urfa, or 'Sanliurfa' as it's known these days. This would be the true test - we were well and truly off the beaten track here, a bustling city
Balıklı Gol fısh pond,
shared by the Kurds and Arabs. Urfa is the supposed birthplace of Abraham, he of Bible fame, though such exoticness does not come to mind when you're entering the city by bus ...