Balıklıgöl

Water breaks at your feet, and it is not one fish jumping — it is hundreds at once. Throw a handful of feed and the surface turns into a churn of orange and grey backs. The sound is wet and hollow, like slow applause. Above you, plane trees hold off the heat. There is a smell of tea, dust and warm stone. Somewhere behind you a call to prayer begins. This long pool sits in the middle of a city, and it is full of carp.

The pool is lined with cut stone and edged with a paved walkway. On the north side, an arcade of pointed arches stands directly above the water and repeats upside down in the reflection. The water is shallow and clear near the wall, and you can see the fish stacked in layers. Some are large and pale, some almost black. They gather wherever people stand. Nobody chases them off, and nobody fishes here. That is the first thing to understand about this place.

The reason is a story told here for a very long time. Tradition says that the prophet Abraham argued against the ruler of the city, a king remembered as Nimrod, and was thrown from the hill above onto a great fire. In the story, God turned the fire into water and the burning coals into fish. This is religious tradition rather than documented history. But it explains the pool, the fish, and the quiet crowd standing around you.

For believers, the carp are protected. People buy small bags of feed from stalls near the entrance and toss handfuls in, and children lean far out over the edge. You will hear that eating one of these fish brings misfortune. Whatever you make of that, the practical result is real. A pool in the middle of a hot southern city holds a dense, undisturbed fish population, fed all day by strangers. Watch a while and you will see them follow footsteps along the wall.

There are actually two pools here. The larger one carries the name Halil-ür Rahman, a title used for Abraham meaning the friend of the Merciful. A smaller pool lies a short walk to the south, named for Zeliha, a figure from local legend. The second one is usually quieter, and the trees around it are older and heavier. Walk over. You get the same fish and the same green water, with far fewer people between you and the edge.

Buildings frame the water on almost every side. At the western end stands the Halil-ür Rahman Mosque, with a square-based minaret and a small burial ground beside it. Along the northern edge, an Ottoman mosque and its arcaded courtyard face the pool directly. That complex is named after an Ottoman governor of the eighteenth century. Domes, arches and minarets all appear inverted in the water when the surface is still. Photographers wait here in the late afternoon for exactly that.

Now look up, to the south. A rocky hill rises above the pool, with the remains of a citadel on top and two tall columns standing on the ridge. People here call them the Throne of Nimrod. The columns are ancient, and one of them carries an inscription in Syriac, an old language of this region, which names a member of the city's ruling family. The story below and the stone above come from two different worlds.

The city around you has been known by several names. In Greek and Roman times it was called Edessa, and it was the capital of a small kingdom on the frontier between larger empires. It became an early and important centre of Christianity, with a school that taught in Syriac. Later it passed in turn to Arab, Armenian, Crusader, Turkish and Ottoman rule. The name Urfa reached us through all of those layers.

Just west of the pool, a mosque complex encloses a small cave. Tradition holds that Abraham was born inside it and hidden there as a child. There are separate entrances for men and women, and a low passage leads to the rock chamber and a spring. Visitors move quietly, some carrying prayer beads. Historians disagree about whether this city is the Ur named in the Bible. Either way, the cave is small, damp, and a different temperature from the street outside.

Here is something that surprises most visitors. In 1993, during construction work in this neighbourhood, workers uncovered a life-size human statue carved from limestone. It has no mouth, and its eyes are set with black stone. It is roughly eleven thousand years old, among the oldest life-size human figures ever found anywhere. You can see it in the city's archaeology museum, a short walk away. It stood here long before any of the stories you have just heard existed.

Step back from the water and the park opens out around you — benches, tea gardens, families, sellers with balloons and roasted chickpeas. In the evening the whole neighbourhood comes down here. If you walk into the older streets nearby in late summer, look up. You may see red pepper paste and chilli drying on flat rooftops. The dark red local pepper flakes, called isot, are made that way, and they go into almost every dish cooked in this city.

Come back to the edge of the pool one more time. Sit on the low wall. The fish move under the surface in slow shifting shapes, the arches repeat in the water, and the sound is mostly voices and moving water. People have come to this exact spot for centuries, for reasons they did not all share. You are one of them now, for a few minutes, in the shade, near the middle of a very old city.