Sefertepe: Taş Tepeler Neolithic Site Guide

✓ Last reviewed: 29 September 2026 — Verified and updated by İlyas Bayrak, licensed Turkish guide (licence 070867), with the My Turkey Adventure editorial team. Prices, opening hours, transport fares and visa rules reflect the latest 2026 guidance. Quick Answer: Sefertepe is a Pre-Pottery Neolithic settlement in the Viranşehir district east of Şanlıurfa , and one of the twelve sites in the Taş Tepeler research programme. Excavations have exposed round and rectangular stone buildings with small T-shaped pillars , placing it in the same 11,000–9,500 BC horizon as Göbekli Tepe and Karahantepe. There is no ticket office and no visitor centre; realistically you see Sefertepe with a licensed guide as an add-on to a Göbekli Tepe tour , and most travellers spend 30–45 minutes there. What Is Sefertepe? Sefertepe is a low mound in the dry farmland east of Şanlıurfa, roughly 60 km from the city centre in the direction of Viranşehir . From the road it looks like nothing at all — a rise in a wheat field, the kind of feature that repeats every few kilometres across the Harran plain. Under that rise is a Neolithic settlement that was already old when the first farmers of Anatolia planted their first deliberate crops. The site entered the archaeological record during regional surveys in the 1990s, but serious excavation only began after 2019, when the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism launched the Taş Tepeler ("Stone Hills") programme. That programme treats Göbekli Tepe not as a freak one-off but as the most spectacular member of a network of settlements spread across the Şanlıurfa region. Sefertepe is one of those settlements, and its value lies precisely in being ordinary. For visitors coming to Turkey for the Neolithic story, this is the point that reframes everything. The headline sites tell you what these people could build. Sites like Sefertepe tell you how many of them there were, and how widely the tradition had spread. If you want the wider frame first, start with ou