Balıklıgöl

Balıklıgöl appears to have been a venerated site long before the time of Abraham, as a statue was found there which dates to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period (roughly 8000 B.C.).

During the Hellenistic period, Edessa was one of the holy sites of the Syrian goddess Atargatis, which also had prominent centers throughout Syria and the Levant in places such as Hierapolis and Ashkelon.

This connection originally dates back to a first century AD Jewish haggada by Pseudo-Philo, which sketches out the basic outline of the story which would eventually have so much significance, where Nimrod, angered by Abraham's rejection of his worship of idols and construction of the Tower of Babel, attempted to burn the patriarch alive, only for him to be miraculously rescued from the flames.

[6] While the majority of Jewish and subsequent Christian and Muslim commentators considered Urfa to be the birthplace of Abraham, this did not necessarily mean there was an explicit connection to Nimrod.

According to Caroline Janssen, there are at least four distinct Nimrods in medieval Arabic geographical texts, and several locations besides Urfa were suggested by Muslim scholars, including Kutha in Iraq and Abarkuh in Persia, where hills of ashes from the fire reportedly could still be seen.

Angered by this, Nimrod then cast Abraham into a massive fire, but the flames were miraculously transformed by God into the pool of water and the logs into the sacred carp.

However, in an interesting twist from Egeria's account of the excellent taste of the carp, Elif Batuman recounts a local legend which claims that anyone who eats one will go blind, a fate which is itself quite similar to the traditions surrounding Aynzeliha Lake and the tears of Zeliha.