The historic church of Urfa (Urha) is being ruined by treasure hunters. Among media outlets covering the condition of the church is the Turkish website Urfanatik.com.
According to the author of the publication Emine Albayrak, Urfa is one of the main tourist attractions in Turkey because of its cultural monuments, but some historical buildings are not properly preserved.
One of them is the historical, most likely Armenian (this is our assumption) Khalfati church, which is located in the Gürkuyu (Nohrut) region. The church needs repair and maintenance, but thieves continue to ruin it. Not only has no work been carried out to restore the church, but the stones of the walls were removed, and some walls were completely demolished.
It should be recalled that Khalfati was once a village in Historical Armenia. It used to be located in the Urfa district of the province of Cilicia, the Armenian population of which was forcibly expelled during the Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire in 1915. Most of the Armenian population died along the deportation route.
Source: www.urfanatik.com
On a rocky promontory above the southwestern shore of Lake Sevan, at an elevation of…
Among the most arresting objects to survive from the Early Iron Age Near East are…
How a promise made to genocide survivors was traded away for peace with Ankara —…
A Fragment That Traveled Across Continents The gilt-silver medallion shown above — two richly dressed…
Few episodes in ancient Armenian history capture the imagination quite like the tradition that Hannibal…
Five angles of one small bronze figure — and what emerges is not an abstract…