“This place is heaven to me,” Khalil says through teeth as yellow and weather-beaten as the dirt his walls are built from. “It has belonged to my family since my father’s father’s day. Since his father’s day. I cannot leave. It is my culture. I must protect it.”

Khalil sips tea in the shade as he converses with us, and his arms disappear beneath a long beige coat each time he reaches for the glass. His head is wreathed in white linen and bound with thick cords in a style unknown throughout the rest of Turkey. And yet, it’s a look that fits in with his surroundings.

Khalil’s family has lived in Harran, a city not far from the border with Syria, for nearly 100 years. His home is packed mud and conical stones, a beehive shape designed to dissipate heat and the local architectural style since early antiquity. Dusty and hot as sin, it feels more a part of the Middle East than it does of Turkey, with its lively bazaar and its women in long black niqabs. But despite his fluent Turkish, Khalil has not forgotten where he came from. “Fallujah” he says, in sparkling Arabic. His eyes smile in remembrance of a place he has never known.

Fallujah was inhabited since Babylonia, but Harran is a far more ancient city. First mentioned 6,000 years ago in the Ebla tablets, it has figured in the Hebrew Bible and the records of the Hittites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Umayyads, and their successors. Harran’s enviable position on the trade route into Anatolia gifted it immense importance in the economic and cultural life of Mesopotamia, and it’s fortuitous placement on a tributary of the Euphrates guaranteed its prosperity. The grand mosque is the oldest in Anatolia, and the remaining structures, ruined as they are, still attest to the grandeur of the structure.

Antiquity has given a quiet to this place, the old city of Harran, but it’s not for lack of people that stillness reigns like the lonely lord of the dead. The heat seeps through clothes, creeps up through shoes, and soaks into the bones until the only thoughts are “hot, water, hot, out, water.” People must still work the fields that provide their livelihood and the produce of the region, and others must tend to the adobe mud houses their families have lived in for generations. Others congregate in teahouses outside the old city, to fan themselves in the shade and drink their bitter draft and smoke cigarettes as the sun idles through the sky. But there’s more to the silence than pre-occupation.

“Before Daesh, we got 1,500 tourists in peak season, per day” Khalil says. “Now, you are the only people for the entire week!” He pauses to drink another sip of his hot tea. “No one comes here since Daesh. No one but local tourists, and they are already few to begin with.” Beneath the carpets that shield us from the sun, we are personally attended by the patriarch himself, while two of his sons wait in the wings to take our orders. Tea, like him, we say. The steaming glasses arrive on silver platters faster than a knife’s cut, carried by a Syrian boy the family has taken in.

Daesh, or ISIS, or ISIL, or the Islamic State, as it is known, does not have much of a permanent presence in Harran. But Harran is 12 miles from Akçakale on the Syrian border. Thousands of refugees have poured through the city, fleeing from one faction or another and the Western airstrikes that follow them. Journalists in nearby Sanliurfa have been beheaded by Daesh militants. The road that leads to the city is known colloquially as the “ISIS Highway.” Naturally, the mere thought of Daesh no more than a 20-minute drive from the town has sent most tourists scurrying. The local industry plummeted in response.

“It is very hard to remain here. When the tourists came, we could repair our home. It costs 1,000 Lira per year. With the rooms we rented and everything we sold, it was enough.” But none of it is subsidized by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, which nationalized the buildings years ago. With tourism drying up and no government intervention, the archaeological ruins of Harran have become increasingly endangered. According to Khalil, “When I was a child here, there were 400 homes like mine. Now there are 100.”

“I am studying in Cyprus to become a lawyer,” Ibrahim, one of Khalil’s sons, says later. “There is nothing for me to do here. There are no tourists, no money. I will leave when the semester starts. I have a place to go. But where will my father and my brothers and sisters go?” His eyes are haunting as he asks us, but there is hope there, too. “Maybe I will be able to support them.”

As we gather our things to leave, Khalil refuses to name his price. He deems four lira – $1.30 – to be enough after a bit of haggling. We shake hands, slip him some extra, and say our goodbyes. Looking out from the air-conditioned confines of our rental car, it’s hard not to notice the decay. To the right of the main road leading out of the ruins, an old Renault rusts into the thin soil. Over there, a pile of garbage rests against a building that could be 10, 200, or 1,000 years old. Further on, a pack of boys congregate around a soccer ball and chase our car when it passes, screaming directions and yelling for lira, euros, whatever in payment. A tree grows tall and lonely in the dirt and its leaves drink up the sun.

It’s a strange phenomenon anywhere else in the world, but in the Middle East, yesterday’s cruelties are remembered fondly when compared with today’s wanton carnage. “It is all the fault of America,” Khalil says. “Where is Iraq? Where is Syria? Where is Libya? Iraq is gone. Syria is gone. Libya is gone.” He pauses for a moment, then continues. “When they killed Saddam, that was the end for Iraq. They killed him on Eid, the little Eid, when the sheep are slaughtered. Every year we remember, and we cry.”