The History Room
Wow, some of these buildings were used as houses until the 1980s!
Why were the Knights Templar So Interested in Harran?
Harran is one of the oldest cities in the World. Located in southern Turkey, a remarkable feature of this ancient place is its beehive-shaped adobe houses, built entirely of mud without any wood. Their design makes them cool inside and is thought to have been unchanged for at least 3,000 years. Some were still in use as dwellings until the 1980s. Harran dates back to at least the Early Bronze Age, to sometime in the 3rd millennium BC.
Renowned as a point on the Silk Road , there are many references to this ancient place in the Bible and, for example, its trade with the Phoenician city Tyre in ‘choice garments, in clothes of blue and embroidered work, and in carpets of colored stuff, bound with cord and made secure’ (Ezekiel 27:23-24).
It is perhaps most famous as the city of Abraham. His birthplace, Sanliurfa, is close by and Harran is the place where his father Terah went to die. My own interest in this city is not, however, in its Biblical connections, fascinating though they are, but in its more esoteric history.
The Christian Interest in Harran and the Ancient Kingdom of Edessa
Harran’s close neighbor, Sanliurfa, holds a clue to this hidden aspect. Sanliurfa has undergone many transformations over the millennia. Most curiously, in the 12th century, when Sanliurfa was a Christian kingdom that went by the name of Edessa, it attracted the attention of the Knights Templar .
There seems to be some significance in St Bernard of Clairvaux, and not the Pope, preaching the Second Crusade at Vezelay in Eastern France, not in order to defend Jerusalem but to rescue Edessa after its capture by the Seljuk Turks in 1145.
The question is, why? Why did St Bernard, who was responsible for helping to create the Knights Templar, take such an interest in this land-locked city-state which, as writer Adrian Gilbert points out, was of no strategic importance on the wrong side of the Euphrates? (Adrian Gilbert Magi – the Quest for a Secret Tradition, Bloomsbury, London, 1996 p. 191) It was quite a military undertaking after all, and not an obvious destination.
Read the rest of the article at the link.
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Originally Posted by RMNIXON
