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.
624 km from Şanlıurfa to Şanlıurfa, about 10 h 51 of riding. The stops in between: Nemrut Dağ, Arslantepe Mound and back through Nemrut Dağ. The stored terrain estimate reaches about 1,350 m; a measured road-elevation profile is not available. It suits an unhurried touring pace.
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.
Göbekli Tepe is where the day begins. Next is Nemrut Dağ.
Nemrut Dağ is a mountain with a king on top. In the first century BC, Antiochus I of Commagene, ruler of a small kingdom between the Roman and Parthian empires, ordered a tomb-sanctuary built on a summit 2,134 metres high, and had it crowned with a tumulus of crushed stone about fifty metres high. On terraces to the east and west sat colossal limestone statues, perhaps eight to nine metres tall, of himself, gods who mixed Greek and Persian traditions, and guardian lions and eagles. Earthquakes and time have toppled the heads, which now lie in rows on the ground, staring out at the mountains.
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 220 km into the recorded legs. Next is Arslantepe Mound.
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.
about 312 km into the recorded legs you reach Arslantepe Mound. 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 Göbekli Tepe.
Return visit. Read the place description above.
Read the complete Göbekli Tepe write-up.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Back at Göbekli Tepe. That is the ride.
Göbekli Tepe → Nemrut Dağ is 220 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
Nemrut Dağ → Arslantepe Mound is 92 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
Arslantepe Mound → back through Nemrut Dağ is 92 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.
back through Nemrut Dağ → Göbekli Tepe is 220 km of getting across. Ride it tidily and keep the enthusiasm for what comes after.