Şanlıurfa Province
From Freepedia
Şanlıurfa (also called simply, "Urfa") is a province in Southeast Anatolia, Turkey. It is also the name of a city within the province. Most of the province's population is Kurdish or Arab.
History
The history of Şanlıurfa city dates as far back as 8,000 BC. It was among several cities in the Euphrates-Tigris Basin that together, are considered to be the cradle of the Mesopotamian civilization. The Turks claim that Urfa (its name, since Byzantine days) is the biblical city of Ur, and is where Abraham was born and defeated by King Nimrud. However, the Iraqis also claim the same about the city of Ur in southern Iraq, as do many historians and archeologists. It appears that one or the other nation has co-opted a grand and ancient history in order to legitimize the current occupants’ claim on that region.
Urfa was conquered repeatedly throughout history, and has been dominated by many civilizations, including the Ebla, Akkadians, Sumerians, Babylonians, Hittites, Huri-Mittanis, Assyrians, Kendani, Mede-Persians, Macedonians (under Alexander the Great), Seleucids, Arameans, Osrhoenes, Romans, Sassanids, Byzantines, Crusaders, and the Islamic empires of the Eyyubi, Seljuk and Ottoman Turks. Islam came to Urfa around 639 C.E., when the Ommiad army conquered the region without a fight.
At the end of World War I, with the Ottoman Empire defeated, and European armies attempting to grab parts of Anatolia, first the British and then the French occupied Urfa. In 1920, Mustafa Kemal Pasha (later called Atatürk), the Ottoman officer who defeated the British at Gallipoli, rallied the Turkish and Kurdish peoples to fight against colonial subjugation and conserve Anatolia for what he hoped, would become the Republic of Turkey.
The Kurds' subsequent defeat of the French earned the city the official title of "Şanlıurfa" (meaning 'Glorious Urfa'), in one of the first laws passed by the legislature of the new Republic of Turkey in 1924. Atatürk promised the Kurds of Urfa that they could organize their own state in the East, if they helped him defeat the European armies that were attempting to seize parts of the dead Ottoman Empire. Although the Kurds comported themselves admirably against the French, Atatürk later refused them statehood in southeast Anatolia, in order to keep the Tigris and Euphrates headwaters, and the fertile plains of Şanlıurfa within the new Turkish Republic.
Geography
Extending over a territory of 18,584 km² (7,173 sq. miles), with:
- Adıyaman to the north;
- Syria to the south;
- the provinces of Mardin and Diyarbakır to the east; and
- Gaziantep to the west;
the province of Şanlıurfa is the largest province of Southeast Anatolia. The Şanlıurfa and Harran Plains extend over an area of about 1,500 km² (579 sq. miles).
Şanlıurfa includes several major components of the "Southeast Anatolia Development Project" (Turkish name: Güneydogu Anadolu Projesi (GAP)), which is a regional program designed to:
- exploit the hydropower potential of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers;
- dramatically expand irrigation agriculture; and
- develop the economy of the region.
This very large-scale, state-sponsored development project involves the damming, redirecting, hydroelectric tapping and multipurpose utilization within Turkey of rivers that feed a broad, semi-arid region. The rivers are shared by two other competing nations, Syria and Iraq. It entails the construction of 22 dams, and hundreds of miles of irrigation works, and is expected to cost $32 billion. if and when it is ever completed (currently, it is 50% completed). Even before GAP, Şanlıurfa Province had the largest share of cultivated and cultivable land in the GAP region, due to its flatness and highly fertile, agricultural land. The "Şanlıurfa-Harran Plains Project" is one of the most important components of GAP, with its target of irrigating 1,677 km² (414,467 acres).
According to the 1990 census, Şanlıurfa Province contained 148,521 households, and the average household size was 6.74 persons. 71 % of household heads described their occupation as farming. The province had 11 district centers (‘ilçe’), 772 villages and 1,646 sub-village settlements. While 551,124 people lived in the district centers, 450,331 people lived in sub-districts, villages and sub-villages.
Şanlıurfa’s average annual growth rate between 1985 and 1990 was 4.6%. This rate is considerably higher than both the national and regional averages. Approximately 40% of the province’s population is Kurdish, 40% is Arab, and 20% is Turkish.
In 1992, Şanlıurfa had the highest concentration of land ownership in Turkey, with a landless rate of 48%. While 5% of the families in the province owned 65% of the land, the vast majority (70%) owned only 10%.
By 2000, the population of Şanlıurfa province has grown to 1,436,956, and that of Şanlıurfa city, 829,000.
External links
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