The Southeastern Anatolian Project (GAP), Turkey’s ambitious, 12-phase hydropower initiative, has been in the works since the late 1960s. Its completion will, its planners hope, provide Turkey with the energy and irrigation to join the “developed world.” But the Ilisu Dam, a critical component of GAP, will turn the ancient city of Hasankeyf—home to archaeological digs and ethnic minorities—into a lake. See it while you can.

A view of Hasankeyf, and the Tigris River.

The Ilisu Dam will flood Hasankeyf. The water will rise to 3/4 the height of this minaret.

The view across the Tigris from the highest point of Hasankeyf, with remains of an ancient bridge (which some conservationists hope to drag to higher ground), and sheep being herded down the banks by local farmers (who will also have to move).

Archaeological sites in the area are in various states of excavation.

Hasankeyf caves with archaeologists’ markings.

Archaeological sites are often demarcated by tape and little else.

A crude coffin contains a skull and other bones repaired and left by archaeologists in the middle of a path through the ruins.

Currently, locals pump water out of the algae-filled Tigris for agricultural use.

Baris, center, and two friends, will move away from Hasankeyf in the coming year.

Local kids spray each other with water, pumped from the Tigris.

Looking up the Tigris from Hasankeyf, lined on the left by shops (now closed for the end of tourist season), and on the right by sheep and goats being herded through the valley.

Abdullah, born in Hasankeyf, lives in the ancient viaduct across the Tigris from the main village. 

POSTSCRIPT
by Alexandra Marvar

Damming the Tigris in southeastern Turkey is controversial for the host of hot-button reasons that nearly all dams are controversial. Add to that the Kurdish-Turkish conflict. Submerging these 125 square miles of Anatolia means pitting centuries of ethnic heritage and legacy against the national opportunity for energy and irrigation.

Author Diane Raines Ward spelled it out in Water Wars: Drought, Flood, Folly, and the Politics of Thirst. The social and political incentives to dam rivers—and subsequently, damn communities and ecosystems to flooding—is an awful obstacle to development. No single existing governmental body is qualified to wield the power of decision exclusively.

But who else is there to navigate? Right now, no one. There is no global committee exclusively dedicated to international water politics. So, at the national level, the destruction of world heritage sites rages on, while the mixed blessing of hydropower continues to spread.

I’ll reflect on my experience standing at the Tigris’s banks for one of its numbered days ’til I am old and senile. But, I wasn’t going to save Hasankeyf from its fate, especially in a situation so politically and culturally complex.

Back at home in New York City, it’s intensely sad to think about the residents of Hasankeyf I met, and the Kurdish communities who will scatter, displaced for a means of providing water and electricity—with no regard for whether or not that means will sooner or later become obsolete.

I think of poet James Merrill words about the fast-developing, ever-changing New York: “Everything is torn down before you have had time to care for it.” If sites and communities like Hasankeyf can’t be saved, we can at least pay our respects by visiting these jewels while they are still accessible, supporting the local communities with tourism. We could see them, learn about them, and maybe even come to care for them … before the water descends.

The UNESCO World Heritage site of Persepolis is in similar peril as Iran plans the Sivand dam. Putting aside U.S.-Iran political hang-ups, is there a better time for an Iranian getaway?

The conclusion to “Village of the Dammed,” a blog mini-series from Turkey, on the country’s controversial Ilisu Dam.

Our first glimpse of Hasankeyf was from across the Tigris. Through the dusty air, a colorful town is gouged into the steep topography of the riverbank. The mosque’s minaret towers over a cluster of houses and a few shops, and above that is a cliff face punctured with gaping caves and speckled with the crumbling remains of an ancient city. The Ilisu Dam won’t destroy all of it; estimates of the reservoir’s height anticipate that the graveyard, the castle, mosques, churches, prisons, domiciles, and a field of other buildings atop the cliffs will be out of the water’s reach. As for the bridge pillars and other ruins along the lower banks, one Turkish engineer aspires to save them by dragging them Fitzcarraldo-style up the mountain to a memorial park where they’ll be safe from the flood. Other experts scoff at this rescue mission. Abdusselam Ulucam, the Turkish archaeologist leading excavation at Hasankeyf, is one of many who believes they’re too fragile: “The stone would crumble to dust in your hands.”

Ishak Pasa, 500-year-old Ottoman palace

Turkey has a lot of Important Ancient Stuff. It hosts two of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and the last residence of the Virgin Mary, not to mention countless decrepit stone structures (visible from any nearby highway) which, at a glance, could have just as easily been built in the 1980s as 380. Prioritizing the meticulous excavation and restoration of all of these points of archaeological interest would be more or less impossible. With outside funding, the most renowned sites—like Ephesus—are being properly restored. When I saw the 5-century-old Ottoman palace Ishak Pasa (left) near Doğubeyazit, it looked as if it were simply being, well, rebuilt. Often, there is no admission charge and there are no guards, no tour guides and no fences. The underwater remains of the city of Myndos, rumored ancient hang-out for Brutus and Cassius, is protected predominantly by a field of sea urchins (which I learned, unfortunately, from “first-hand” experience, sigh).

Hasankeyf has been affected by the local population for decades. It was declared a conservation area by Turkey in 1981, well after discussion of Ilisu Dam had started amongst GAP’s planners. However, it was recognized as special by the local community well before that—the caves winding up the mountainside still shops and cafés to cater to tourists as early as 1972, according to a current shop owner. And for centuries prior, the site—as most old world archaeological treasures are—was picked over and rearranged by imperial powers and passers-through.

When I visited, the archaeologists were nowhere to be seen. They had moved on from recovering artifacts to photographing and archiving their finds. But excavation sites were scattered like open graves around the riverbed. Anyone can prod through them (painted shards of pottery are lying around in the dirt), and all that stands between a curious wanderer and the freshest dig is some plastic tape and a ‘do not enter’ sign. The only place our (12-year-old) guide wouldn’t take us was a zig-zig stairway up the face of a cliff, locked up after a visitor recently fell and died. Everything else was fair game.

Tourist season was apparently over, but kids had yet to return to school, and it was still a bright, sunny, 85-degree day in Hasankeyf. (The aforementioned sandstorm finally blew over Batman.) Our guide, Barış, had been giving tours since age nine. Both his brothers, one older, one younger, offer tours as well, in Turkish and Kurdish, for whatever pay their clientele feels is appropriate. There is some international tourism—the bulk of visitors we saw on our visit were Turks and Germans of Turkish descent. Barış recited memorized passages at various points on our hike; he’d learned the bulk of what he told us from books and the elders around him, so truth value was questionable, and details were scant, though his company was pretty endearing.

Our 12-year-old tour guide, Barış. His name means “peace” in Turkish.

The site may be relatively neglected by the tourism industry because it’s overshadowed by the development and accessibility of other more tourist-friendly sites like Ephesus, which has the added advantage of being a quick trip from eurotour hotspots Izmir and Bodrum. Or because rumors of its fate have been on the horizon for decades now, and no one has bothered to build the necessary infrastructure to support foreign outsiders. More likely, it’s just that Turkish-Kurdish violence has made the region difficult (sometimes completely unsafe) to traverse. Were the political climate less tumultuous, it’s anyone’s guess whether Hasankeyf, in the less-developed east, would draw more international attention. Were it not highlighted by the Ilisu project, it’s anyone’s guess whether it would have been properly excavated and protected from the elements. Those who lament its impending disappearance seem to think it would. And still, some say drowning it is the only way to save it: that the ruins should be dragged up the mountain to an eerie ancient sculpture garden and the rest is safer as a scuba attraction.

Locals pump water out of the algae-filled Tigris for agricultural use.

We weaved our way down from the ruins to a three-story cave restaurant on the river’s edge for some Fanta. The restaurateurs gave their handcrafted souvenir merchandise to us for free: “gifts,” unusual given the fierce barter economy that characterizes the rest of the country’s commerce. The gift-giving is sad, though; it seemed like they’d already given up on tourism. Up the road was the main stretch of Hasankeyf village—one commercial strip: clothing and souvenir shops, a general store, a row of fruit bins with old men in rocking chairs watching us pass, a loom, a storefront full of watermelons, a few bowls of carp on the sidewalk. Carp is pretty much the only fish that can thrive in this stretch of the Tigris, as its algae-laden waters trickle between the feet of livestock. The water siphoned out through makeshift water pumps into the village on either bank isn’t potable for humans. The residents pump their drinking water from wells.

In anticipation of the dam, Barış knows he’ll have to leave soon, but it’s yet to be decided where. His hope is Istanbul, city of 15 million, about as far (in every sense) as you can get in Turkey from Hasankeyf village. Abdullah, who makes his home in the remains of the ancient bridge that flanks the Tigris at Hasankeyf, was born here. Along with the troop of 12-year-olds who take the opportunity to practice their English (”see you later” is the trophy phrase in their catalog), Abdullah is on the self-appointed welcoming committee, and opens his arms to a chance to share his pride in his home.

A woman, walking with her son to the doctor in the village, balanced out his enthusiasm with marked reserve. Many reporters and researchers have been through the area asking about Ilisu, and people are afraid to give their names or discuss how they felt about the dam with visitors. It’s safer not to have an opinion, she says. She didn’t know when her family would have to leave or where they would go; she only knew it would probably happen in the coming year. She sums up the feeling of the whole place with a beleaguered sigh: “We are just waiting.”

On the way to Hasankeyf, my companions and I stopped at Hotel Gap (named, actually, for GAP) in the industrial Kurdish city of Batman—a city that will soon be on the fringe of the new Ilisu reservoir. We pushed the Hasankeyf visit back by a day. We arrived in Batman, oh, say, five hours later than we’d estimated due to a couple unforeseen obstacles.

Remember what I’d mentioned about a lack of infrastructure? Well, Turkey is working on it, as evidenced by the more or less continuous five-hour construction site along the highway from Van west to Batman. We sat in a traffic jam while, 10 trucks ahead of us, excavators up the face of a roadside cliff spilled gigantic boulders onto the interstate, a bulldozer scraped them out of the way and ushered us past before the next (relatively) controlled avalanche.

Another hold-up: aforementioned security checkpoints. We stopped to show our passports every few hours along the route—and even more frequently as we neared the Iraqi border. And then of course, there’s the inclement weather. Like America’s Gulf Coast gets its influx of hurricanes, Syria is experiencing some seriously intense sandstorms right now, and some of that weather has blown into this region. The air was thick with dust, visibility was poor, and our contact lenses, ears, and snot were full of ancient dirt. More on that later. Or not.

And the final obstacle: Americans and Turks navigating the fragile political climate in this intensely Kurdish city. It hasn’t held us up, but there’s been an undercurrent of ethnic tension since we arrived. No offense Batman, but we’re looking forward to getting out of here and seeing Hasankeyf tomorrow.

Before heading to Hasankeyf, the focus of the Ilisu Dam controversy, my traveling companions and I visited the small shiite village of Örtülü, in eastern Turkey, on the southwest side of Mount Ararat, where we were invited to spend the afternoon at the local schoolhouse.

Fourteen kids, ages six to 11, darted around the grounds in nationally mandated blue smock uniforms. They were all beautiful and, while they recited the Turkish alphabet for me with zeal, they were obviously way more interested in our presence (particularly the presence of my video camera), and the fleet of donkeys the boys had wrangled, than in the classroom. The majority of girls will attend school until the age of 11 or so when they’ll then settle into domestic responsibilities. About half of the boys attend the middle school in a neighboring town while they other half stays to work on the farms. I chatted (via one of my travel companions Tamer, who translated) with Gokhan Güney, the only school teacher for a total enrollment of 32 students (though we never caught a glimpse of the missing 18). He mentioned that the population of the area has been steadily decreasing. Tamer later explained to me that Kurdish separatists come into the village and ask young Kurdish boys to join their cause, and boys who refuse are killed. Many pack up and leave the region out of fear and frustration. Since this visit, I’ve been thinking hard on the presence of the Kurdish nation in Turkey (which populates the region from here south to the Iraqi border) and their long and deeply rooted history of oppression.

An estimated 15 million Kurds, more than half of the world’s Kurdish population, live in Turkey, the rest divided between Iran, Iraq, and Syria. The small but loud extremist sect of the Kurds—that which casts the shadow of violence over Örtülü—began fighting with the Turkish government in 1984 for an autonomous Kurdistan, and since then, the conflict has taken between 35,000 and 40,000 lives. A couple days ago, 16 Turkish military guards were killed on the road from Van to the Iranian border by PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party) violence—a road I’d traversed earlier that very day, complaining how many security checkpoints we were forced to shuffle through. Our accommodations near Ararat, the glorious Hotel Nuh, also accommodated a group of 13 German tourists in July, three of whom were kidnapped off the slopes of Ararat by the PKK and rescued by Turkish forces one week later.

This “invisible nation” of Kurds is the largest ethnic group in the world without a homeland. So, the reality that the Ilisu Dam will displace between 59 and 199 Kurdish settlements—depending on which side is counting—including Hasankeyf, is all the harder to swallow. The impending flooding the Ilisu Dam will cause has been called “a cultural massacre” by the pro-Kurdish parliament representative from this region, and locals theorize that the Turkish government is building the dam solely to uproot them: “If you can’t catch a fish,” one Hasankeyf  resident says, “you drain the sea.” On the other side of the argument, Tamer, a Turk who worked on the Ilisu project as a UNDP consultant in the ’90s, does mourn the loss of sites like Hasankeyf and empathizes with the non-extremist Kurd population like those whom he and I talked to at the schoolyard this afternoon, but insists the dam is totally unrelated to concerns of national security. “[The dam] has nothing to do with the Kurds,” he says in an exasperated tone (it seems he’s heard this line of questioning before). “It is being built to bring jobs and irrigation to the region… It is one step in a 12-part project. You can’t just stop in the middle.”

Very suddenly, it’s pitch dark in Doğubeyazit.

Power outages in hotels (and entire towns, for that matter) are a relatively common occurence in Turkey, not for lack of energy, but for lack of infrastructure. This is when the wise old saying “don’t try to run before you can walk” (or something like that) comes to mind, though it sort of morphs into, “don’t try to swim in the giant new lake you’ve created before you can, you know, effectively distribute the energy and other resources you do have to the people who need it.”

In the dark, I twiddled my thumbs, reflecting on the fact that Turkey has so far failed to meet most of the 153 Terms of Reference  set forth by the Committee of Experts, a group of consultants and experts appointed by investors to evaluate the the Ilisu Dam. This may cause investors to back out (again, that is—major european backers dropped out over similar concerns of unpreparedness in the past, temporarily halting the project, which has been stop-and-go since the 1970s. In the same overeager fashion, I figure, they may be skipping some crucial developmental steps necessary to ensure that the anticipated benefits of the Southern Anatolia Project (GAP) dams will flow as smoothly throughout the region as they hope. But, I’m only figuring.

And then, the lights flickered back on as the Hotel Nuh’s generator—one of the more crucial amenities of the three-star hotel—kicked into gear with a buzz. I read that Turkey’s largest dam, the Ataturk, was completed in 1990. For its immediate neighbor, the city of Sanliurfa, it did just what it promised, delivering new jobs, foreign investment and economic growth. But only a short distance away, the thousands that had been resettled for its construction and promised better existences had given up their homes and gained little to nothing, enjoying little in the way of improved employment opportunities or higher quality of life. Turkey lacks the infrastructure to disperse whatever gains would be made from these major projects; with the Ilisu cranking out 2.4% of the nation’s energy supply, there’s no guarantee that, even while a city like Sanliurfa is booming, we wouldn’t still end up suddenly fumbling for the doorknob by the light of a laptop screen.

Self-defined as a “rather ambitious” project, Turkey’s 12-phase energy initiative, called GAP, covers approximately 10% of the total surface area of the country and affects around 10% of the population, or about 6.6 million people. Over much of the surface area affected by GAP, farmland is being submerged and farmers displaced. But, according to the project’s rationale, the resulting decrease in agricultural production will be more than offset by an increase in agroindustries. Via GAP, new crops have already been introduced and Turkey has become a supplier of fruit and vegetables to western Europe (namely Germany). Economic development—in this case, what the government hopes will become self-sustaining economic development—leads to opportunities for employment and for education.

In major hydropower projects, one dam’s function is contingent on others’. Within GAP, the impending Ilisu Dam is a long-planned next step in developing and maintaining GAP’s other working parts, and one central to the project’s overarching development goals. But studies report that the bounty from GAP has been unevenly distributed. While towns nearest the dams do reap the benefits, other places in the affected region, including the new homes of the displaced, report that nothing has improved. In response to that argument, a former UNDP GAP consultant reminds me, “It’s not easy; it doesn’t happen overnight.” But that isn’t enough to stave off opposition from many corners, including some vehement accusations about Ilisu developers’ fundamental intentions. Here is a smattering of what the opposition says:

Archaeologists: Only a fraction of a massive site replete with archaeological potential has been excavated.
Putting an estimated 5,000 caves and countless ancient structures under water after only a handful of frantically focused years of archaeological attention really dampens humanity’s ability to glean all that’s to gain about Mesopotamian cultural history from this layered site.

Reminds us of: China (The Three Gorges Dam’s 350-mile long reservoir will submerge 1300 largely unexplored sites, ancient temples and burial grounds along the Yangtze River)

Health experts: With new water comes new diseases.
Diseases like malaria and leishmaniasis, which have never before afflicted the region, are concomitant to standing water, and increased humitidy levels in the soil. GAP has doubled the amount of irrigated land since its inception, and with unprecidented access to water, mosquitos and bacteria that didn’t stand a chance before will thrive.

Reminds us of: Ethiopia (Residents of the villages around the Koka and other dams in Africa see a much higher incidence of malaria)

Environmentalists and Ecologists: An entire ecosystem will be destroyed. There won’t be a natural filter for pollution any more. Dams aren’t sustainable.
The dam will weaken the river’s filtering power upstream, where major cities like Batman and Diyarkbakir contaminate the river with industrial pollutants. Downstream, ecosystems that rely on seasonal flooding will wither, as the dam will prevent floods. Although the area to be submerged is largely arid with little flora and fauna beyond agricultural crops and livestock, plants and animals living in the region will be affected (i.e. drowned).

Reminds us of: Vietnam and Brazil (the Nam Theun 2 Dam and the Belo Monte Dam, both still in planning stages, would submerge rainforest and, between the two of them, affect tens to hundreds of endangered species)

Iraq: Um, excuse us, what do you think you’re doing with our water?
The Tigris and Euphretes, both affected by GAP, flow over Turkey’s southern borders into Syria and Iraq, and damming them certainly affects the amount of water that will pass through post-Ilisu. British company Balfour Beatty, which pulled out of investing in 2001 due to environmental and humanitarian concerns, argued that dams would actually regulate and equalize the flow south, as much as doubling the amount of water available to the rivers’ downstream beneficiaries. That consoling theory didn’t stop Iraq from filing a lawsuit, which has been pending in international courts for the past decade.

Reminds us of: Egypt (told Israel that its plans to dam the Nile in Ethiopia “would be understood as an act of war”), the US (damming in the American Southwest lead to a lawsuit against the states by Mexico on behalf of the communities that were drying up along with the Colorado River).

Human rights advocates: “Resettlement” of these tens or hundreds of Kurdish settlements is a travesty.
Opponents cite Turkey’s less-than-impeccable track record with major resettlement efforts on past projects, and lament the displacement of thousands by the Ilisu reservoir and the lack of information many are reportedly dealing with. Rumors circulate about violence between Turkish authorities and Kurdish villagers in evacuating for the dam. The Kurdish Human Rights Project fleshes out this issue.

Reminds us of: Brazil (the Belo Monte Dam would displace thousands of indigenous peoples who have never lived elsewhere; many are largely uninformed about plans for the dam) and Lesotho (the Lesotho Highlands Water Project was negotiated between South Africa’s apartheid regime and corrupt administration in Lesotho in the ’80s and carrying it out in its current form would be detrimental to both nations’ peoples)

Kurdish separatists: Flooding Hasankeyf is a cultural massacre.
Drowning a part of “Kurdistan” (for the Kurds, the name of the unrecognized Kurdish nation which exists across southeastern Turkey), is seen by Kurds and their advocates as the government’s desperate retalliation against a national security concern. Wiping out Hasankeyf and other Kurdish villages and settlements and fracturing their established community in this region won’t do much to sooth the ethnic and political animosity between these long-warring groups.

EDIT: The first two paragraphs of this post have been updated to include more information about GAP.

Hasankeyf is a millenia-old city, home to almost every powerful civilization in Mesopotamia’s archaeological record from the Western Roman Empire forward. It has been continuously inhabited until just the past two years. Now it sits in purgatory waiting for its own Great Flood.

The flood waters would come with the construction of the Ilisu dam, one component in a 12-phase energy initiative, the Southern Anatolia Project (Güneydoğu Anadolu Projesi, or GAP). The GAP involves damming the Tigris and the Euphrates (an idea originally conceived by ruler Atatürk in the 1930s) to produce “clean” energy, new jobs, irrigation and agroindustry, and with those things, regional economic growth. The first of GAP’s 22 dams was completed in 1987. Ilisu Dam, named for Ilisu town, was conceived in the ’50s and designed by 1982. A master plan for the dam unfolded in the last two decades. Its ETA changes as fickle or anxious investors come and go. In the meantime, the inhabitants in the predominantly Kurdish region that will be submerged upon the dam’s completion are treading water while they await news.

Achieving the energy and development goals of the GAP could help pull Turkey out from under its “developing nation” reputation and into the modern world—maybe even into the E.U.  But the cost of progress in the case of Ilisu—drowning myriad priceless archaeological sites and ancient monuments, destroying an ecosystem, and disrupting the lives of tens of thousands of people—reflects the conflicts between development and preservation, energy and environmentalism, modernity and heritage.

A view of the El Rizk mosque, built by the Ayyubids in 1325, in Hasankeyf. Authorities estimate that flood waters from the Ilisu Dam will reach to 3/4 the height of its minaret.

Hasankeyf is at the center of the Ilisu controversy. The site has been continuously inhabited since years BC, and Roman, Byzantine, Arabic, Mongol, Ottoman, and, in modern times, Kurdish cultures have all left their mark. Those who were told they would have to leave during the resettlement stages of the Ilisu development are waiting for information and compensation. According to reports, the dissemination of details from the dam commission has been disorganized, vague, and sometimes nonexistent. And despite clamor from financial backers and the assigned “Committee of Experts” about the Turkish government’s reported lack of preparation when it comes to social and environmental issues, construction of the dam is underway.

So, wading through a din of opposition (dozens of NGOs, archaeologists, ecologists, environmentalists, health experts, human rights advocates, the World Bank, Swiss and German export credit agencies (ECAs), the government, and Kurdish separatist extremists all have an opinion), the Turkish government and its European financiers struggle to pull it together for a project they believe in, in hopes of creating a great advantage—instead of a great disaster—out of this next great flood.

On that note I’m off to Turkey—specifically the region holding its breath, waiting to be submerged beneath Ilisu’s 125-square-mile lake—to see it for myself, and calculate some exchange rates: if energy and development come at the expense of environmental and cultural stability and millenia-old sites like the village Hasankeyf, is the price too high? And if it is, is it too late to look back?