When Abraham came of age, he destroyed Nimrod’s idols, and in retaliation Nimrod “made a catapult out of the castle’s twin pillars” and hurled Abraham into a pit of fire below. When Abraham landed, the flames miraculously turned into water, and the wood used to stoke the fire was turned into carp.

The carp are now called kutsal balıklar, or “sacred fish”, and the spring water is believed to have healing properties   The fish are not eaten.  According to legend, anyone who eats the carp will go blind.

In ancient times, the pond and its carp were sacred to the fertility goddess Atargatis, or Tar’atha. With the shift in religion, the pond and its fish became associated with the prophet Abraham instead. This pond is mentioned in the late-4th-century account of the Christian pilgrim Egeria, who spent three days at Edessa   and wrote that the fish were “shining and succulent”. According to Drijvers, a temple to Atargatis once stood in this area.

There was a major effort to renovate the Balıklıgöl complex in the 1990s and turn it into a cultural heritage site, clearing out “noisy vernacular elements” and making it into a tidy, organized space. Before, the complex was run-down and crowded in by makeshift houses, which the authorities considered “an eyesore and a safety hazard” and were expropriated and demolished.

Balıklıgöl is associated with folk religious practices which, in recent decades, have become somewhat controversial with Muslim revivalists who “insist that such things have no place in Islam”. For example, on Qadr Night (Kadır Gecesi), the night commemorating the first revelation of the Qur’an to Muhammad, tens of thousands of Muslims come to Balıklıgöl to “spend the night awake in communal worship”.   This practice may have its origins in the Christian ritual of incubation that was practiced in Christian Edessa.

The city’s mufti also brings out a glass case that supposedly contains Muhammad’s beard (Sakal-ı Şerif), and people crowd around and try to touch or kiss it.   According to local tradition, spending Qadr Night at Balıklıgöl three years in a row is equivalent to one pilgrimage to Mecca – although such a claim tends to be frowned upon by Muslim clerics.