PHOTO ESSAY
A set of dams and years of battle have reworked the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which gave rise to among the many 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.) Objectives. 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 further 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 big watersheds in Syria, Kuwait, and Iran, to lastly empty into Persian Gulf on the sweltering marshland shores of Iraq.
Ten years up to now, I walked with Yazar alongside the banks of Tigris on the classic settlement of Hasankeyf in Turkey. An space shepherd named Çoban Ali Ayhan sang for us there an outdated ballad that was additional like a cry of pure agony.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 monitor that was a hymn to actual love, which is to say, to love unrequited. It was an ode to loneliness, to prepared, to the attractive struggling of betrayal. In several phrases: the correct monitor for every the standard riverbed and its doomed metropolis, which could rapidly disappear under the reservoir of but yet another big 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 singular trove of architectural wonders that had seen the passing of Roman legionnaires and Silk Freeway caravans, some 12,000 years of memory — have been rapidly to be erased.
Yale Environment 360
“What can we do?” Ayhan glumly instructed us. “We opposed the dam. It is going ahead anyway.”
In the intervening time, the place is underwater.
In his documentary pictures enterprise “Misplaced Paradise,” Yazar presents us with the human and environmental costs of this big reengineering of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Turkey.
Yazar’s perspective is on a regular basis 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 a complete lot of dams, canals, weirs, and diversion duties massive and small are altering his homeland truly previous recognition. Turkish authorities insist that the lots of of 1000’s of tons of poured concrete for these river developments are necessary for agricultural self-sufficiency, for irrigation, and the hydropower wished to help in the reduction of the nation’s dependency on abroad vitality.
Nonetheless Yazar captures a pastoral Mesopotamia — “the land between two rivers” — being rapidly reworked by inundation, relocated villages, in depth mining duties, deteriorating water top quality, and drastic native climate change. The two life-giving rivers that prolonged sustained the world’s numerous cultures are being throttled.
Whereas engaged on this enterprise in Iraq near the Turkish border this summer time season, Murat was arrested by Kurdish security forces, who confiscated his digicam and detained him for 9 days.
Once more after I hiked the banks of the Tigris with Yazar, a frail truce between the Turkish navy and Kurdish separatists was coming unraveled. (Immensely dangerous military campaigns have since swept the world.) Refugees have been flooding into Turkey from war-ruined Syria. And the tamed Tigris and Euphrates squeezed their method by the use of limitless pipes and concrete channels to distant Basra, the home of Sinbad the Sailor.
Even now, nonetheless, not all is however misplaced.
Yazar’s pictures remind us, by the use of their delicate portraits of the gritty riverside communities nonetheless struggling to adapt, that time however stays to save lots of plenty of what stays of the world’s ecosystems and traditional lifeways. Yazar’s pictures is not going to be mere lament. They are a identify to movement.
Scroll proper all the way down to see the pictures, or click on on on the image beneath to launch a slideshow.
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 properties alongside the Tigris River, which have 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 higher 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, nonetheless a rising water desk is hurting some dry-loving crops.
Parts 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, 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 employees, killing them.
Abuzer Mahmoud, a 12-year-old Romani boy in Bismil, Turkey. Abuzer’s family fled the civil wrestle in Syria and now spends lots of the 12 months dwelling 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 resulting from drought.
Children play beneath the Delal Bridge on the Xebir River, a tributary of the Tigris, in Zakho, Iraq.