Guide
Urfa castle stands on Damlacık Dağı, also called Dambak Tepesi, in the middle of Şanlıurfa. The Ministry's page offers three different datings without choosing between them: the hill is thought to be a neolithic site going back to around 10,000 BC, the castle itself is estimated to have been built around 2000 BC, and a widely held view puts its construction in the Abbasid period between AD 812 and 814. It played an important part during the Crusades and was repaired under the Ottomans. It has two parts, inner and outer: the outer castle has four gates, the inner, with twenty-five towers, has one.
Two stone columns with Corinthian capitals stand on top of the castle, raised as honorific monuments between AD 240 and 242 in the reign of Manu IX, king of Edessa. The Syriac inscription on the eastern column records that it was set up, with the statue that stood on it, by Aftuha son of the military commander Barşamaş, for queen Shalmath — daughter of the crown prince Manu, wife of King Manu, and his patron.
The same two columns belong to a story about Abraham. In the legend the tyrant of the day, Nimrod, ordered Abraham thrown into the fire, and a great fire was lit in the city; a catapult was set up on the castle and Abraham was flung into the flames from it. Popular tradition holds that these two columns were the catapult.
The Balıklıgöl statue, also called the Urfa Man and estimated to be around twelve thousand years old, was found in the area around the castle and is now in the Şanlıurfa Museum. West of the castle lies a burial ground known as the Kale Eteği necropolis, where many tombs cut into the bedrock and dated to the 2nd to 6th centuries AD have been recorded. Their square or rectangular chambers are usually entered down a few steps, and inside, on three sides, run arched benches for laying out the dead along with niches called loculi; mosaics have been found on the floors of some chambers and frescoes on their walls. The address is Yusufpaşa, 5. Cd., 63100 Eyyübiye.
