08/09/2026
Dara sits about twenty miles southeast of Mardin, where the hills run down into the Mesopotamian plain. In AD 505 the Emperor Anastasius ordered a fortress thrown up here in a hurry, because Rome had handed Nisibis to the Persians a century and a half earlier and had been regretting it ever since. His engineers cut the stone straight out of the hillside and built the walls with it. Two and a half miles of wall. Twenty-eight towers.
When the quarries were worked out, the city turned them into a cemetery. Those arched doorways you can see in the rock face are tombs.
Then there is the water. Justinian rebuilt the place a generation later and had the river run through an underground channel, so that an army camped outside would find nothing to drink. What survives underneath the site includes cisterns you can still walk down into, vaulted in cut stone and big enough to lose your voice in.
In 530 a young general named Belisarius fought the battle that made his name on the plain outside these walls. In 573 the Persians took the city after months of siege. It changed hands twice more, and then it stopped being a fortress at all.
A village sits on top of it now, its houses built out of the city's own stones.
We will be walking Dara on the GENESIS 2027 expedition with Joel Richardson next June.
To learn more about this extraordinary trip visit our website:
https://livingpassages.com/tour/genesis-expedition-eastern-turkey/
