A Photo Gallery from Hasankeyf, Turkey

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.

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Part 6 in “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…

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Part 5 in “Village of the Dammed,” a blog mini-series from Turkey, on the country’s controversial Ilisu Dam. 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... Read & Discuss

 Part 4 in “Village of the Dammed,” a blog mini-series from Turkey, on the country’s controversial Ilisu Dam. 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.. Read & Discuss

Part 3 in “Village of the Dammed,” a blog mini-series from Turkey, on the country’s controversial Ilisu Dam.

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…

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Part 2 in “Village of the Dammed,” a blog mini-series from Turkey, on the country’s controversial Ilisu Dam.

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…

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Part 1 of “Village of the Dammed,” a blog mini-series from Turkey, on the country’s controversial Ilisu Dam.

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.

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