Mor Evgin Monastery ('The Second Sumela') and Beyazsu Spring Valley

Along the southern cliff edge of the Tur Abdin plateau between Dara, Nusaybin and Midyat, a sheer 600-metre limestone escarpment known in antiquity as Mount Izla drops straight down to the flat Mesopotamian plain. Hidden in the folds of this cliff sit a 4th-century monastery that rivals Trabzon's Sumela and a rushing turquoise oasis stream that cools the entire region in summer.

1. Mor Evgin Monastery (Mar Awgin, "The Sumela of the Southeast")

Founded in the first half of the 4th century AD (around 350 AD) by Mor Evgin (St Awgin of Clysma), an Egyptian pearl diver from Suez who became a Christian monk and travelled to Mesopotamia with seventy disciples to introduce monasticism to the region before Mor Gabriel was even built, Mor Evgin Monastery clings like an eagle's nest high up on the vertical south face of Mount Izla (reached via a newly paved winding mountain road turning north off the D400 highway 20 km east of Nusaybin, or descending from the Midyat, İdil plateau road). After standing empty for decades, the monastery was lovingly restored and reopened by resident Syriac monks:

• Why the view is memorable: stepping out onto the stone courtyard terrace of Mor Evgin gives you a sheer, vertiginous drop straight down onto the geometric fields of Mesopotamia stretching endlessly across the Syrian border, with early rock-cut hermit cells (where monks once lived in total solitude inside the cliff face) carved into the limestone crags directly overhead.

2. Beyazsu ("White Water" Valley, Between Nusaybin and Midyat)

Twenty minutes west of Mor Evgin along the shaded gorge road linking Nusaybin to Midyat, an enormous karst spring called Beyazsu bursts out of the dry limestone mountains, turning an arid desert canyon into a four-kilometre ribbon of rushing, ice-cold turquoise water, willow trees, poplars and walnut groves (which also supplies clean drinking water to Mardin city). On warm afternoons from April through October, dozens of riverside restaurants set out floating wooden pergolas and woven divan beds (taht) directly in the middle of the rushing stream so you can dangle your feet in the 12°C water while eating charcoal-grilled river trout (alabalık) and drinking tea.