Sanliurfa (also called simply Urfa) is a southeastern Turkish province (pop: 1,436,956 in 2000) anchored by the city of the same name (pop. 829,000 in 2000). Most of the province's population is Kurdish or Arab. The history of Sanliurfa city dates as far back as 8000 BC. It was among several cities in the Euphrates-Tigris Basin that together are considered to be the cradle of Mesopotamian civilization. Turks claim that Urfa (its name since Byzantine days) is the biblical city of Ur, and is where Abraham was born and defeated King Nimrud. However, Iraqis claim the same about the city of Ur in southern Iraq (as do many historians and archeologists). It appears that one or the other nation has co-opted a grand and ancient history in order to legitimize the current occupants’ claim on that region.

Urfa was conquered repeatedly throughout history, and has been dominated by many civilizations, including the Ebla, Akkad, Sumerians, Babylonians, Hittites, Huri-Mittanis, Assyrians, Kendani, Mede-Persians, Macedonians (under Alexander), Seleucids, Syriacs, Aramaeans, Osrhoenes, Romans, Sassanids, Byzantines, Crusaders, and the Islamic empires of the Eyyubi, Seljuk and Ottoman Turks. Islam came to Sanliurfa around 639 C.E. when the Ommiad army comquered the region without a fight.

At the end of World War I, with the Ottoman Empire defeated and European armies attempting to grab parts of Anatolia, first the British and then the French occupied Urfa. In 1920, Mustafa Kemal Pasha (later called Atatürk, or “father of the Turks”), the Ottoman officer who defeated the British at Gallipoli, rallied the Turkish and Kurdish peoples to fight against colonial subjugation and conserve Anatolia for what he hoped would become the Republic of Turkey. The Kurds’ subsequent defeat of the French earned the city the official title of Sanli Urfa (meaning Glorious Urfa) in one of the first laws passed by the legislature of the new Republic of Turkey in 1924. Atatürk promised the Kurds of Urfa that they could organize their own state in the East if they helped him defeat the European armies that were attempting to seize parts of the dead Ottoman Empire. Although the Kurds comported themselves admirably against the French, Atatürk later refused them statehood in southeast Anatolia in order to keep the Tigris and Euphrates headwaters and the fertile plains of Sanliurfa within the new Turkish Republic.

Extending over a territory of 18,584 km2 (7,173 mi.2) with Syria to the south and the provinces of Mardin and Diyarbakir to the east, Gaziantep to the west, and Adiyaman to the north, Sanliurfa Province (Figure 2.6) is the largest province of Southeast Anatolia. The Sanliurfa and Harran Plains extend over an area of about 1,500 km2 (579 mi.2). Sanliurfa includes several major components of the Southeast Anatolia Development Project (its Turkish acronym is GAP, after its Turkish name ‘Güneydogu Anadolu Projesi’), which is a regional program designed to exploit the hydropower potential of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, dramatically expand irrigation agriculture, and develop the economy of the region. This very large-scale, state sponsored development project involves the damming, redirecting, hydroelectric tapping and multipurpose utilization within Turkey of rivers that feed a broad, semiarid region shared by two additional competing nations – Syria and Iraq. It entails construction of 22 dams and hundreds of miles of irrigation works, and is expected to cost $32 billion if and when it is ever completed (currently at around 50%). Even before the GAP, Sanliurfa Province had the largest share of cultivated and cultivable land in the GAP region due to its flatness and highly fertile agricultural land. The GAP’s Sanliurfa-Harran Plains Project is one of the most important components of the GAP with its target of irrigating 167,729 ha (414,467 acres).

According to the 1990 census, Sanliurfa Province contained 148,521 households, and the average household size was 6.74 persons. Seventy-one percent of household heads described their occupation as farming. The province had 11 district centers (‘ilçe’), 772 villages and 1,646 sub-village settlements. While 551,124 people lived in the district centers, 450,331 people lived in sub-districts, villages and sub-villages. Sanliurfa’s average annual growth rate between 1985 and 1990 was 4.6% – considerably higher than both the national and regional averages. Approximately 40% of the province’s population is Kurdish, 40% is Arab, and 20% is Turkish.

In 1992, Sanliurfa had the highest concentration of land ownership in Turkey with a landless rate of 48%. While 5% of the families in the province owned 65% of the land, the vast majority (70%) owned only 10%.

External links

• Pictures of the capital of this province