My students had made dubious claims regarding their homeland before—the Turkish origins of "Ibrahim" Lincoln being my personal favorite—but these prejudices were harder to dispel.

Southeastern Turkey is the feared land of the Kurdish separatists, militaristic Turks and separatist Arabs in the Hatay. It is also home to some of the greatest cultural, historical and religious monuments in the world. My heart was set on Sanliurfa and the ancient cities of the southeast that lay beyond it.

So, on a frigid February day, my husband and I boarded an intercity bus for a 19-hour trip that took us over the Anatolian plains, into the Taurus Mountains, across the Euphrates River and, at 3 a.m., to an unlit road in the Mesopotamian desert.

“These were pious and tolerant Muslims, whose shared beliefs overrode the divisions between Kurds, Arabs, Turks, and even Americans.”

When we stepped out of the bus, I discovered that the mud on the ground came up to my knees. We waded through a parking lot accompanied by an English-speaking Kurdish boy who found a cab to take us to Hotel Ugur, a hotel on the roof of a kebab house that cost $10 USD per night. The outside stank of blood and cumin. Mustafa, the hotel's friendly owner, brought us to our double occupancy room, equipped with heat and a Western toilet—both relative luxuries—where we immediately fell asleep, uncertain of what awaited us the next day.

Much closer to Syria and Iraq than Istanbul, Sanliurfa means different things to different people.

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