Hasankeyf

7 October 2012

Yesterday, I crossed the border into Turkey and came back into another predominately Muslim country.

The first town I came to was Hopa and I was immediately aware of the number of tea stalls full of men drinking tea and playing backgammon. The  older women tended to be conservatively dressed, with a head scarf and a long coat covering all their clothes.

Rather than follow the original Black sea coastal trading route to Istanbul, I decided to travel south to pick up the route from Iran which headed through central Turkey. This meant traveling south through the night to Van, a small town on the edge of Lake Van and close to the Iranian border. In the early hours of the morning I arrived in this dusty town, now much more developed than I remember it for a previous visit but still obviously more conservative than the western areas of Turkey. The bus skirted round the edge of the vivid blue Lake and into the hills of south east Turkey. I was heading for Hasankeyf, a village which once occupied a complex series of cave dwellings in the gorge of the Tigris river valley. This village is a wonderful historical site and archaeologists have begun to excavate. However, it has the cloud of a giant engineering project hanging over it. The Turkish government seem adamant that the proposed dam will flood the region within the next four years, displacing 37 villages.

The landscape of southeast Turkey is changing dramatically. The dam project (Guneydogu Anadolu Projesti),is bringing irrigation waters to large arid regions and generating enormous amounts of hydroelectricity for industry. There are definite signs of more lakes, developing market towns and new industry. The newly constructed duel carriage way connecting the southeast with Istanbul is nearing completion at this furthest point. Many parts of the old windy route have been changed leaving some villages stranded out in the dust.

The need for development is obvious in Turkey as in the other parts of Central Asia, but the impact of changes on this scale are clear. Not only are there ecological and social impacts but the rich archaeological evidence of Turkey's past is now in danger.

One development that is noticeable in every village is the introduction of solar heating. On roof tops there are arrangements of panels heating the water tanks. I am not sure whether this one was heating water for the family or the animals.