Upper Mesopotamia, between the Euphrates and the Tigris, is where people first built in stone on a grand scale, long before farming took hold. The road also passes Roman mosaics, a mountain-top tomb of a king and the black walls of Diyarbakır.
A Roman city on the Euphrates whose villas were partly flooded by the Birecik dam in 2000.
Şanlıurfa, the city tradition makes the birthplace of Abraham.
🚗 82 km between today’s places, as the crow flies. Sleep in Şanlıurfa.
Round enclosures of carved T-shaped pillars, built from about 9600 BC by people who had not yet taken up farming.
Göbekli Tepe’s neighbour and contemporary, with a chamber of pillars cut out of the bedrock and a carved human head looking out from the wall.
An ancient city on the plain near the Syrian border, with conical beehive houses, the ruins of one of the oldest mosques in Anatolia and a tradition linking it to Abraham.
🚗 about 15 km from the day before, 72 km between today’s places, as the crow flies. Sleep in Şanlıurfa.
On a summit about 2,150 m high, King Antiochus I of Commagene raised his tomb mound between colossal statues of gods and of himself; their heads now sit on the ground.
🚗 about 127 km from the day before, as the crow flies. Sleep in Kahta.
A mound near Malatya with a palace complex of around 3000 BC, where the oldest known swords were found, together with thousands of clay sealings from its storerooms.
Diyarbakır’s black basalt city walls, almost six kilometres around, with the Hevsel Gardens running down to the Tigris.
🚗 about 56 km from the day before, 172 km between today’s places, as the crow flies. Sleep in Diyarbakır.
A Byzantine frontier fortress city founded around AD 505 to face Persia, with huge underground cisterns and a necropolis of rock-cut tombs outside the walls.
🚗 about 103 km from the day before, as the crow flies. End in Mardin.
Distances are straight lines between places, so allow more on the road. Times on site are our estimates.