Christian Travel News & Information
Turkey
Dara, the Ancient City Called Resurrection
Twenty miles southeast of Mardin there is a ruined city that everyone calls Dara. That was the local name, the one that stuck, and it is what the road signs say today. Its official name was Anastasiopolis. The emperor who built it was Anastasius, and emperors named cities after themselves. But Anastasius is not a neutral name. It comes from…
The Durupinar Site: What the 2026 Noah’s Ark Investigation Is Actually Testing
What is the Durupınar Site? On a hillside in far eastern Turkey, in the Doğubayazıt district of Ağrı province, about twenty-nine kilometers (eighteen miles) south of Mount Ararat, a long ridge of earth runs across the slope in the shape of a ship’s hull. The Durupinar site, spelled Durupınar in Turkish, emerged in 1948, when heavy rains and earthquakes stripped…
Mount Cudi (Judi) Turkey: The Oldest Claim to Noah’s Ark
Mount Cudi, written Cudi Dağı in Turkish and pronounced “Judi,” is a limestone ridge in Şırnak province in southeastern Turkey, rising to about 2,114 meters above the Tigris near Cizre. It holds the oldest recorded claim to be the landing place of Noah’s Ark. A Babylonian priest named it in the third century BC, the Aramaic translators of Genesis placed…
Tower of Babel: Was it Actually in Northern Mesopotamia?
Two Candidates at Opposite Ends of Mesopotamia Genesis sets the Tower of Babel in a place it calls Shinar, and says nothing about where Shinar was. That single missing detail has produced two rival proposals that could hardly sit farther apart. One places Babel in the far south of Mesopotamia, near Babylon or older still at Eridu, among the first…
King Abgar’s letter to Jesus: Edessa’s ancient Christian claim
How a small Syriac kingdom in what is now southeastern Turkey may have been among the first on earth to believe. A kingdom on the edge of the Syrian desert became Christian while Rome was still feeding believers to the lions. It kept in its royal archives a letter its kings believed Jesus had written by his own hand, and…