PHOTO ESSAY
A sequence of dams and years of battle have reworked the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which gave rise to a few of the world’s earliest civilizations. Kurdish photographer Murat Yazar centered his lens on these rivers of his homeland and on the individuals who stay alongside them.
What hasn’t poured into the Tigris and Euphrates rivers?
Raindrops. Blood. Snowmelt. Ashes. Hope. Pesticides. Ink. (When the Mongols plundered Baghdad in 1258 A.D., they tossed so many books from the town’s libraries into the Tigris that the currents ran black with ink.) Desires. Tales. Time.
The photographer Murat Yazar understands this. He is aware of that rivers are the biographers of panorama. That they cradle inside their currents a swirling distillation of each incident and anecdote that has transpired within the inhabited landscapes they course via. And few rivers carry a headier and extra sobering brew of historical past — tales of human woe and triumph — than the Tigris and Euphrates, the fabled waterways that pour via the heartlands of Eurasian civilization, via the Fertile Crescent, from their chilly headwaters within the mountains of Turkey via huge watersheds in Syria, Kuwait, and Iran, to lastly empty into Persian Gulf on the sweltering marshland shores of Iraq.
Ten years in the past, I walked with Yazar alongside the banks of Tigris on the vintage settlement of Hasankeyf in Turkey. An area shepherd named Çoban Ali Ayhan sang for us there an previous ballad that was extra like a cry of pure agony. His voice bounded down the sandstone canyons of the Tigris, with a tune that was a hymn to real love, which is to say, to like unrequited. It was an ode to loneliness, to ready, to the beautiful struggling of betrayal. In different phrases: the proper tune for each the traditional riverbed and its doomed city, which might quickly disappear underneath the reservoir of yet one more huge authorities dam. The caverns of Hasankeyf, as soon as lit by the campfires of the Neolithic, in addition to close by ruins of fortress partitions, ornate minarets, and cliff-top citadels — a singular trove of architectural wonders that had seen the passing of Roman legionnaires and Silk Highway caravans, some 12,000 years of reminiscence — have been quickly to be erased.
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“What can we do?” Ayhan glumly advised us. “We opposed the dam. It’s going forward anyway.”
In the present day, the place is underwater.
In his documentary images undertaking “Misplaced Paradise,” Yazar presents us with the human and environmental prices of this huge reengineering of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Turkey.
Yazar’s perspective is all the time native. He’s an ethnic Kurd from Şanlıurfa, Turkey, and the son of generations of shepherds; for him the human connections to this panorama of his childhood are sacred. The development of a whole bunch of dams, canals, weirs, and diversion tasks large and small are altering his homeland actually past recognition. Turkish authorities insist that the thousands and thousands of tons of poured concrete for these river developments are important for agricultural self-sufficiency, for irrigation, and the hydropower wanted to assist cut back the nation’s dependency on overseas power.
However Yazar captures a pastoral Mesopotamia — “the land between two rivers” — being quickly reworked by inundation, relocated villages, intensive mining tasks, deteriorating water high quality, and drastic local weather change. The 2 life-giving rivers that lengthy sustained the area’s assorted cultures are being throttled.
Whereas engaged on this undertaking in Iraq close to the Turkish border this summer time, Murat was arrested by Kurdish safety forces, who confiscated his digicam and detained him for 9 days.
Again after I hiked the banks of the Tigris with Yazar, a frail truce between the Turkish military and Kurdish separatists was coming unraveled. (Immensely harmful navy campaigns have since swept the area.) Refugees have been flooding into Turkey from war-ruined Syria. And the tamed Tigris and Euphrates squeezed their manner via countless pipes and concrete channels to distant Basra, the house of Sinbad the Sailor.
Even now, nevertheless, not all is but misplaced.
Yazar’s photographs remind us, via their delicate portraits of the gritty riverside communities nonetheless struggling to adapt, that point but stays to save lots of what stays of the area’s ecosystems and conventional lifeways. Yazar’s pictures aren’t mere lament. They’re a name to motion.
Scroll all the way down to see the pictures, or click on on the picture beneath to launch a slideshow.
The Euphrates River near its headwaters in Turkey.
Cihan Çal watches over his sheep close to the Keban Dam reservoir on the Euphrates in Turkey. The farmhouse behind him was deserted after the dam flooded pastureland.
The Karakaya Dam on the Euphrates River.
Residents of Hasankeyf, Turkey, go to the location their former properties alongside the Tigris River, which have been submerged by the Ilısu Dam in 2020.
An oil discipline in Hasankeyf, Turkey.
A person bathes his horse within the Atatürk Dam reservoir on the Euphrates River.
Canals carry water greater than 100 miles from the Atatürk Dam to Kiziltepe, Turkey.
Ahmet Yilmazsoy says his 450 pistachio timber died after water flowed to his city from Turkey’s Atatürk Dam reservoir in 2017. Farmers are utilizing water diverted from the Euphrates for irrigation, however a rising water desk is hurting some dry-loving crops.
Elements of Çekem, Turkey, which sits on the Euphrates River, have been submerged after the Birecik Dam was opened in 2000.
Farmers lay tomatoes out to dry in Siverek, Turkey, close to the Euphrates River.
A cyanide pond on the Çöpler Gold Mine close to the Euphrates in Turkey. Cyanide, used to separate gold from ore, started leaking from the location in 2022, and in 2024, a landslide of contaminated soil buried 9 staff, killing them.
Abuzer Mahmoud, a 12-year-old Romani boy in Bismil, Turkey. Abuzer’s household fled the civil conflict in Syria and now spends many of the 12 months residing in tent camps alongside the Tigris.
The place the Tigris River divides Turkey and Syria, Turkish officers have constructed a border fence to cease unlawful crossings.
Fisherman Muhammet Nemrik says Iraq’s Mosul Dam reservoir on the Tigris River has shrunk dramatically due to drought.
Youngsters play beneath the Delal Bridge on the Xebir River, a tributary of the Tigris, in Zakho, Iraq.