Urfa—historically known as Edessa—was a multi-ethnic city in Upper Mesopotamia and an important cultural and economic center linking Anatolia to the Syrian plains. Armenians formed a substantial and vibrant community, numbering between 25,000 and 30,000 and making up nearly one-third of the city's population on the eve of the First World War alongside other minorities including Assyrian and Latin Christian communities.

The Armenian quarter, rising along the slopes of Mt. Telfedur, was structured around a dense network of social and economic instiutions anchored by the Cathedral of the Holy Mother of God, as well as schools, workshops, and bazaars. Armenians played a central role in the city’s commercial and craft production, dominating trade and participating in guilds such as stonecutting, weaving, metalwork, and dyeing. This activity was supported by the fertile agricultural landscape irrigated by the Berik River.

This urban and social fabric was violently disrupted at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries: the Hamidian massacres of 1895—during which the cathedral was burnt and and thousands of Armenians were killed—and the 1915 Urfa resistance, a three-week defense mounted by Armenians against deportation, which was ultimately crushed by Ottoman troops. In the aftermath of the genocide, the surviving population was displaced, and the material and institutional presence of Armenians and other Christian communitieswas systematically erased or appropriated and repurposed. What remains is a city whose former diversity persists largely through archival traces and acts of memory.