Dam dooms cradle of civilisation
Kurds living in a settlement dating back 11,500 years are to lose their homes as part of a project criticised as politically motivated, writes Louise Callaghan.
At this time of year, Birsen Argun’s pomegranate trees are bearing fruit, the branches hanging heavy over the courtyard where she spends her days looking out over the waters of the Tigris.
Her family has been here, in the southeastern Turkish town of Hasankeyf, for generations. Meyse, her 83-year-old mother, remembers when everyone lived in the caves that dot the hillside. First settled in the Neolithic period, about 11,500 years ago, they were warm in the winter and cool in the burning summers.
This week, the family are supposed to leave it all behind and move to a new town of identikit concrete blocks up the side of the valley. Hasankeyf is about to be submerged under 200ft of water as a result of Turkey’s Ilisu dam.
‘‘Will our lifetimes be enough to grow a garden like this again?’’ said Argun last week, staring up at the trees. ‘‘It’s all going to be underwater soon.’’
It is not just family history that is vanishing as a result of the new dam. Mesopotamian civilisation is losing one of its key landmarks and little effort has been made to excavate the archaeological treasures that are thought to lie buried there before the water entombs them for good.
Hasankeyf lies at the northern tip of the Fertile Crescent, the arc of territory that has been called the ‘‘cradle of civilisation’’. Archaeologists say agriculture began in the lands fed by the Tigris and its sister river, the Euphrates, and led to the wheel, irrigation, writing and other milestones of human development.
Little known outside the region, Hasankeyf is now populated largely by Turkey’s Kurdish minority, who herd sheep and farm small, fertile plots. But it vies with more famous cities in its historical significance.
Archaeologists have found remains of settlements near Damascus from around 9000BC. Jericho has what are believed to be the world’s oldest fortifications, built in about 6500BC. Hasankeyf is believed to have been settled long before that when Neolithic groups formed cave dwellings in its limestone cliffs.
It has since survived millennia of Mesopotamian civilisations and has been controlled by the Assyrians, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Mongols and Ottomans, among many others. It became known as Hisn Kayfa after the Arab invasion of the region in AD640. There are tales of Marco Polo passing through more than 600 years later on his way to China.
When the water comes, sites thought to contain remarkable historical evidence will be submerged. A Japanese-Turkish team of archaeologists that made significant excavations in Hasankeyf in 2017 said it bore certain similarities to Gobekli Tepe, an ancient settlement about 100 miles to the west, thought to be the site of the world’s oldest temple. Yet while Gobekli Tepe was carefully excavated and opened to the public, Hasankeyf will be sunk.
Further west, a big rescue effort was made when Zeugma, a Roman site near the city of Gaziantep, faced being flooded by the creation of a dam. Archaeologists working there in the 1990s uncovered some of the finest mosaics yet found, including the famous ‘‘Gypsy Girl’’ – now on display in Gaziantep’s museum – and a depiction of Achilles leaving to fight in the Trojan War.
Archaeologists from across the world managed to rescue the most valuable artefacts before the site was flooded in 2000. In Hasankeyf, however, there has been no such large-scale international effort. ‘‘There’s a lot of cultural heritage treasure that is going to be lost,’’ said Thomas Jeffrey Miley, a political sociology lecturer at Cambridge University.
The Turkish government, in a rather half-hearted attempt at conservation, has moved about half a dozen of the hundreds of historical buildings and artefacts in Hasankeyf up the hill. A minaret dating from around the 13th century now stands next to a climbing frame in the middle of the new town.
Miley sees political dimensions to the situation: ‘‘Hasankeyf is emblematic because it’s an ancient place that is being destroyed by the dam project, and it’s also a Kurdish town, and it links into an assault of the Turkish state on the Kurdish minority,’’ he said.
‘‘As the situation in the Middle East with climate change gets more severe, the question of controlling water becomes all the more important in terms of being able to control the population.’’
The Tigris flows into Iraq, where it provides vital water to the southern marshlands. Hundreds of thousands of livelihoods could be affected if it dries up.
The Turkish government claims the Ilisu dam is needed to supply electricity to Turkey’s burgeoning population. Critics point out that, with dozens of dams and power plants on the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, Turkey last year used only two-thirds of available power capacity. And environmentalists say the power could be generated by other means.
‘‘This dam will produce a certain amount of energy but the costs are just too high – it’s unnecessary,’’ said Ercan Ayboga, a hydrologist at the Bauhaus University in Weimar. ‘‘We need smaller solutions that cause less damage.’’
For the 3000 people who live in Hasankeyf, the dam means the second population shift in less than 50 years. In the 1970s, the authorities moved many from their cave homes into houses by the river. The town is now a warren of sandstone passages, shaded by vines and fig trees. Some say they will move back into the caves when the water rises. Others will stay put till the last minute.
‘‘Hasankeyf isn’t worth a penny now – they’ve screwed it all up,’’ said Meyse Argun. ‘‘When I was young we were so poor that we didn’t even have bread. But it was peaceful.’’
For some old people, however, the functional but unlovely concrete homes in the new Hasankeyf are an improvement. They remember near-starvation when harvests failed, and years of fighting between Kurdish militants and the state. For them the flooding of the town and destruction of the monuments does not rank as a huge disaster.
‘‘It’s much nicer than my old house,’’ said Diadin Direk, 61, a moustachioed former village leader, sitting in his new living room. ‘‘I don’t see what the fuss is about. I can’t do anything with old rocks.’’ – Sunday Times