CURVESCOUT / MOTORCYCLE RIDE
Ordered leg totals agree within rounding. Stop distances are approximate sums of rounded legs. Stops, delays, approach and any separate return travel add time. Basis: producer-declared routed record.
Reading history stays on this device. My road watch requires a separate selection; opening it does not subscribe this ride.
Distance and riding time are measured on the routed road. Check local closures and conditions before you ride.
A 573 km round trip from Malatya - roughly 9 h 07 in the saddle. The stops in between: Nemrut Dağ, Göbekli Tepe and back through Nemrut Dağ. The stored terrain estimate reaches about 1,400 m; a measured road-elevation profile is not available. It was put together for the scenery rather than the shortest line.
Arslantepe is a tall mound on the plain just outside Malatya in eastern Turkey, and it hides one of the longest continuous stories of human settlement in the region. The name means lion hill, after the stone lions found at its gate, but the earliest layers go back to around 6000 BC, and the people who lived here over the next seven thousand years built, burned and rebuilt a succession of towns on the same spot. In the fourth millennium BC the site held a palace complex with storerooms, administrative rooms and wall paintings, which archaeologists regard as one of the earliest signs of organised state power in the Near East, with clay seals used to control the goods. Arslantepe also yielded some of the oldest known swords, made of arsenic bronze.
Read the complete Arslantepe Mound write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Arslantepe Mound is where the day begins. Next is Nemrut Dağ.
On the summit of Nemrut Dağ, at a little over two thousand metres in the Taurus mountains of south-eastern Turkey, a king ordered his own sanctuary to be built, and the result is one of the strangest sights in the world. Antiochus I, ruler of the small kingdom of Commagene in the first century BC, wanted to be remembered among the gods. He had an artificial mound of crushed stone raised over his tomb, about fifty metres high, and in terraces on its east and west sides he set colossal seated statues, some eight to nine metres tall, of himself, of Greek and Persian gods, of a lion and an eagle. Over the centuries earthquakes and frost brought the heads tumbling off, and they now sit on the ground in rows, staring out across the terrace with calm stone faces.
Read the complete Nemrut Dağ write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Nemrut Dağ comes up about 79 km into the recorded legs. Next is Göbekli Tepe.
Göbekli Tepe turned the story of civilisation upside down. On a limestone ridge above the plain north-east of Şanlıurfa, about thirteen kilometres from the city, hunter-gatherers raised rings of enormous T-shaped stone pillars more than eleven thousand years ago, some of them taller than a bus and carved with foxes, snakes, boars, vultures and scorpions. That is some six thousand years before Stonehenge, and before pottery, metal tools or farming had been invented. The assumption had been that people built monuments after they settled and farmed. Göbekli Tepe suggests that the urge to gather and build may have come first.
Read the complete Göbekli Tepe write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
about 286 km into the recorded legs you reach Göbekli Tepe. Next is back through Nemrut Dağ.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Nemrut Dağ write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
back through Nemrut Dağ, late in the day. Next is Arslantepe Mound.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Arslantepe Mound write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Back at Arslantepe Mound. That is the ride.
Arslantepe Mound → Nemrut Dağ is 79 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
Nemrut Dağ → Göbekli Tepe is 207 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
Göbekli Tepe → back through Nemrut Dağ is 208 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
back through Nemrut Dağ → Arslantepe Mound is 79 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.