Gobekli Tepe
UNESCO World Heritage Site (Gobekli Tepe, 2018); Pre Pottery Neolithic Sanctuary, Roughly 9600 8200 BC · Sanliurfa, Sanliurfa
Gobekli Tepe is the reason the textbooks were rewritten. On a limestone ridge above the Harran plain, hunter-gatherers with no pottery, no metal, no writing and no agriculture raised circles of T-shaped pillars up to five and a half metres tall, carved them with foxes, boars, cranes, snakes and scorpions, and did it around 9600 BC - some seven thousand years before Stonehenge and six before the first cities of Mesopotamia. The accepted order of things had monumental building following farming and settled life; this site puts it the other way round, or at least tangled with it. Stranger still, the enclosures were deliberately backfilled in antiquity, which is why they survive. Only a small fraction of the mound has been dug. What a visitor sees today is a modern canopy, a raised walkway and the tops of several excavated enclosures from above - an intellectually enormous site and a physically modest visit.
Orencik Mahallesi, Gobeklitepe Oren Yeri, Haliliye, Sanliurfa, Sanliurfa, Turkiye
Open daily with longer summer hours and an earlier winter close. A shuttle runs from the ticket office and car park up to the site itself; the walkways under the canopy are the whole visit. Excavation seasons can close sections without notice. Check before travelling.