Gobeklitepe & Urfa Tour

All Year Round  / Private Tour

Early morning you will be picked up from your hotel in Istanbul, transfer to airport and flight to Urfa, arrival and you will be met at the airport by our guide then driven to Gobekli Tepe to enjoy your day in Gobeklitepe and Urfa.

Gobekli Tepe is the oldest known man-made religious structure in the world. The site, located on a hilltop, contains 20 round structures which had been buried, four of which have been excavated. All are decorated with massive, mostly T-shaped, limestone pillars that are the most striking feature of the site. The limestone slabs were quarried from bedrock pits located around 100 meter (330 ft) from the hilltop, with neolithic workers using flint points to carve the bedrock. The majority of flint tools found at the site are Byblos and Nemrik points. That neolithic people with such primitive flint tools quarried, carved, transported uphill, and erected these massive pillars has astonished the archaeological world, and must have required a staggering amount of manpower and labor.

Two pillars are at the center of each circle, possibly intended to help support a roof, and up to eight pillars are evenly positioned around the walls of the room. The spaces between the pillars are lined with unworked stone and there are stone benches between each set of pillars around the edges of the wall.

Many of the pillars are decorated with carved reliefs of animals and of abstract enigmatic pictograms. The pictograms may represent commonly understood sacred symbols, as known from Neolithic cave paintings elsewhere. The reliefs depict lions, bulls, boars, foxes, gazelles, donkeys, snakes and other reptiles, insects, arachnids, and birds, particularly vultures.

After visiting Gobeklitepe we continue to our day tour with the main sightseeing areas in SanliUrfa city center, we visit Abrahams Cave and the surrounding Pools of Holy Carp, then we walk around the oriental covered bazaar. Lunch in a local restaurant that makes really delicious kebabs belongs to Urfa region. Enjoy your ‘’Mirra’’ which is a kind of Turkish coffee.

End of the tour transfer to airport and flight to Istanbul, transfer to your hotel in Istanbul or we can extend your holiday to your next Turkey travel destinations.