Abraham Path

Abraham Path
Route information
Length: 1,078 km (670 mi)
Existed: 2007 – present
Major junctions
From: Urfa
To: Negev


The Abraham Path is a long-distance walking trail across the Middle East which connects the sites visited by the patriarch Abraham as recorded in ancient religious texts and traditions.[1] The path begins in the north in Yuvacalı, Turkey,[2] which is a village located north of the city of Urfa (natively: Şanlıurfa), and goes as far south as Beersheba in the Negev desert of Israel. Local partnership organizations[3] and tour operators in the Middle East facilitate the travel of walkers on the path and there is now information available for the independent traveler, including maps, GPS tracks, and site descriptions.[4] The Abraham Path currently extends across 1078 kilometers (about 670 miles) through four countries and the eventual path will traverse 5,000 kilometers (about 3,000 miles) through ten countries. People walk the trail, staying in homestays and sharing meals with local families in villages along the way. The trail passes through sites of Abrahamic history, varied landscapes, and a myriad of communities of different faiths and cultures, which reflect the rich diversity of the Middle East: from Kurdish, Muslim, Jewish, Christian, Alevi, Bedouin, Fellahin, Samaritan, etc. The story of Abraham is about a man from the Bronze Age who travels throughout the Fertile Crescent and into the desert of the Arabian peninsula.[5]

History

The path was started in the first decade of the 21st century by the Abraham Path Initiative, a registered 501c3 nonprofit organization based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, with a global network of partners. William Ury, negotiator and author of Getting to YES helped found the project at Harvard University's Program on Negotiation. Ury's TED Talk speaks about the beginnings of the path and the vision behind the Initiative. Ury says that every culture has an origin-story, and that the origin-story of the Middle East is about how a man and his family walked the Middle East about four thousand years ago.[6] The Abraham Path Initiative is endorsed by the United Nations World Tourism Organization, the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations [7] and other international partners . The initiative is a non-profit, non-religious and non-political organization, whose mission is to support local partners in developing the Abraham Path as:

Overview of the current path

The main historical Abrahamic sites on the current Path are Urfa (the birthplace of Abraham according to Muslim tradition), Harran (according to the Hebrew Bible, this is a town Abraham lived in, and from which he received the call to start the main part of his journey), Jerusalem (the scene for the binding of Isaac according to the Hebrew Bible), and Hebron (the location of the tomb of Abraham and his wife Sarah, according to Jewish, Christian and Muslim traditions).

Regions of the current path:[9]

Details of the regions of the current path

See also

List of long-distance footpaths

References

  1. ↑ "Abraham's Path". Harvard. Retrieved 8 May 2013.
  2. ↑ "Home - Abraham's Path". Abrahamspathturkey.org. Retrieved 2013-04-22.
  3. ↑ http://www.abrahampath.org/connect/our-partners/local-partners/
  4. ↑ http://www.abrahampath.org/discover/all-path-overview/
  5. ↑ Tad Szulc. "Journey of Faith - National Geographic Magazine".
  6. ↑ William Ury. "William Ury: The walk from "no" to "yes" - TED Talk - TED.com".
  7. ↑ "Education". United Nations Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC).
  8. ↑ "Hiking in Abraham's Footsteps, From Turkey to the Holy Land". Haaretz.com.
  9. ↑ http://www.abrahampath.org/discover/

Further reading

External links

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