Turkey has a lot to be proud of, both from a historical perspective and from a modern. If we turn our attention solely to the historical, there’s a breathtaking lot to admire and feel happy about.
12,000 years old and historical: Take the Gobekli Tepe temple complex or the Pot Belly Hill. Called so because the hill on which it was built had a soft bulged out look, something like a pot belly. Archaeologists put down the age of this magnificent temple, Pot Belly Hill, at 12,000 years. This means it preceded the building of the Great Pyramid by 7,000 years and Stonehenge by 6,000 years.
Because of these landmark distinctions, it is the oldest prehistoric structure discovered. Besides, it also came before the development of structured human societies like villages, human societies, agriculture, industry and the use of pottery.
Location of Pot Belly Hill: Situated in southeastern Turkey, about 15 km from the town of Urfa, it has forested mountains to the north. To the south lies the Syrian border and ahead of it are ancient Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent, the fecund spot that is known as the cradle of civilizations. In the east are the Biblical Harran plains and to the west, 300 miles away, is the oldest known Neolithic village, Çatalhöyük.
At the topmost tip of the Fertile Crescent lies Göbekli Tepe. This crescent area is a highly productive piece of land, situated on shoulder of forests and plains. Being in the midst of forests meant having access to hunting prey for food—something the people must have done. It also meant that gazelles and migratory birds could be seen here.
Wheat was first sown here at a mountain near Pot Belly Hill. In the same area, animal husbandry was also begun in about 8000 B.C. After this, cattle were tamed in 6500 B.C., after which pottery followed. These discoveries were then taken to Çatalhöyük, 300 miles to the west and adapted there.
What makes it a world-renowned site? 
In 1995, Schmidt, a German archaeologist, first excavated this site and over the decades found that what was buried here under the stone fragments of this site was in fact a huge and developed temple complex, replete as a ceremonial site, which was similar to the ‘Rome of the Ice Age.’ This huge and meticulously built temple was built by hunters-gatherers of the area that camped there and killed game for food.
Even today, the Gobekli Tepe temple is of great significance to Turkey and to the rest of the world because it is the first historical site where humanity gave itself a giant leap towards urban life.
Pot Belly Hill is constructed in circles, with the largest circle being 27.4 meters in diameter and each pillar being a maximum of 5.2 meters high. The amazing thing about this site is that when excavated, its stones were found intact and erect, with simple pillar etchings. These temples prove that mankind sprang from its 14,000 year-old reign of being hunters and gatherers to people with spiritual imagery and a knowledge of logistics, economics and politics.
The carvings on their pillars are filled with reptiles and insects such as scorpions, vultures, snakes, spiders and three-fanged monsters, apart from human forms. Perhaps they practiced a sky burial by exposing their dead to the elements, in the absence of human bones.
Besides, there is no sign of water here, and everything had to be brought in from elsewhere. So, this temple site could not be called a settlement or village. Since the temple came before any sign of a village, Schmidt concludes that here man’s first house was his temple, after which came the city.
Their worship and rituals came to an end in 8000 B.C. when all of Pot Belly Hill was buried abruptly. It was in disuse for the past 1000 years, proved by the fact that later temple circles were greatly diminished in size. This marked the end of this historic civilization.
But where one civilization ended, another more settled one arose. Here, hunters were replaced by farmers and shepherds with modern ways of living and worshipping. However, the temple complex was not abandoned but ruined by nature’s forces and lay buried under 300-500 cubic meters of soil.