PHOTO ESSAY
A group of dams and years of battle have reworked the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which gave rise to some of the world’s earliest civilizations. Kurdish photographer Murat Yazar centered his lens on these rivers of his homeland and on the people who dwell 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 city’s libraries into the Tigris that the currents ran black with ink.) Needs. Tales. Time.
The photographer Murat Yazar understands this. He’s conscious of that rivers are the biographers of panorama. That they cradle inside their currents a swirling distillation of every incident and anecdote that has transpired inside the inhabited landscapes they course by the use of. And few rivers carry a headier and additional sobering brew of historic previous — tales of human woe and triumph — than the Tigris and Euphrates, the fabled waterways that pour by the use of the heartlands of Eurasian civilization, by the use of the Fertile Crescent, from their chilly headwaters inside the mountains of Turkey by the use of enormous watersheds in Syria, Kuwait, and Iran, to lastly empty into Persian Gulf on the sweltering marshland shores of Iraq.
Ten years prior to now, I walked with Yazar alongside the banks of Tigris on the classic settlement of Hasankeyf in Turkey. A neighborhood shepherd named Çoban Ali Ayhan sang for us there an outdated ballad that was additional like a cry of pure agony. His voice bounded down the sandstone canyons of the Tigris, with a music that was a hymn to actual love, which is to say, to love unrequited. It was an ode to loneliness, to prepared, to the gorgeous struggling of betrayal. In several phrases: the precise music for every the normal riverbed and its doomed metropolis, which could shortly disappear beneath the reservoir of but another enormous authorities dam. The caverns of Hasankeyf, as quickly as lit by the campfires of the Neolithic, along with shut by ruins of fortress partitions, ornate minarets, and cliff-top citadels — a novel trove of architectural wonders that had seen the passing of Roman legionnaires and Silk Freeway caravans, some 12,000 years of memory — had been shortly to be erased.
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“What can we do?” Ayhan glumly instructed us. “We opposed the dam. It is going ahead anyway.”
Proper now, the place is underwater.
In his documentary pictures problem “Misplaced Paradise,” Yazar presents us with the human and environmental costs of this enormous reengineering of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Turkey.
Yazar’s perspective is always native. He is 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 event of an entire lot of dams, canals, weirs, and diversion initiatives giant and small are altering his homeland really previous recognition. Turkish authorities insist that the tens of tens of millions of tons of poured concrete for these river developments are vital for agricultural self-sufficiency, for irrigation, and the hydropower needed to help in the reduction of the nation’s dependency on abroad energy.
Nevertheless Yazar captures a pastoral Mesopotamia — “the land between two rivers” — being shortly reworked by inundation, relocated villages, in depth mining initiatives, deteriorating water prime quality, and drastic native climate change. The two life-giving rivers that prolonged sustained the realm’s assorted cultures are being throttled.
Whereas engaged on this problem in Iraq near the Turkish border this summer season, Murat was arrested by Kurdish security forces, who confiscated his digital digicam and detained him for 9 days.
Once more as soon as I hiked the banks of the Tigris with Yazar, a frail truce between the Turkish army and Kurdish separatists was coming unraveled. (Immensely dangerous navy campaigns have since swept the realm.) Refugees had been flooding into Turkey from war-ruined Syria. And the tamed Tigris and Euphrates squeezed their means by the use of numerous pipes and concrete channels to distant Basra, the home of Sinbad the Sailor.
Even now, however, not all is however misplaced.
Yazar’s footage remind us, by the use of their delicate portraits of the gritty riverside communities nonetheless struggling to adapt, that time however stays to avoid wasting plenty of what stays of the realm’s ecosystems and standard lifeways. Yazar’s footage shouldn’t mere lament. They seem to be a identify to movement.
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The Euphrates River close to its headwaters in Turkey.
Cihan Çal watches over his sheep near the Keban Dam reservoir on the Euphrates in Turkey. The farmhouse behind him was abandoned after the dam flooded pastureland.
The Karakaya Dam on the Euphrates River.
Residents of Hasankeyf, Turkey, go to the positioning their former homes alongside the Tigris River, which had been submerged by the Ilısu Dam in 2020.
An oil space in Hasankeyf, Turkey.
An individual bathes his horse inside the Atatürk Dam reservoir on the Euphrates River.
Canals carry water better than 100 miles from the Atatürk Dam to Kiziltepe, Turkey.
Ahmet Yilmazsoy says his 450 pistachio timber died after water flowed to his metropolis from Turkey’s Atatürk Dam reservoir in 2017. Farmers are using water diverted from the Euphrates for irrigation, nevertheless a rising water desk is hurting some dry-loving crops.
Elements of Çekem, Turkey, which sits on the Euphrates River, had been submerged after the Birecik Dam was opened in 2000.
Farmers lay tomatoes out to dry in Siverek, Turkey, near the Euphrates River.
A cyanide pond on the Çöpler Gold Mine near the Euphrates in Turkey. Cyanide, used to separate gold from ore, began leaking from the positioning 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 family fled the civil battle in Syria and now spends loads 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 stop illegal crossings.
Fisherman Muhammet Nemrik says Iraq’s Mosul Dam reservoir on the Tigris River has shrunk dramatically as a result of drought.
Children play beneath the Delal Bridge on the Xebir River, a tributary of the Tigris, in Zakho, Iraq.