Eight Buildings and a Reservoir
In 2020 the reservoir behind the Ilısu Dam closed over Hasankeyf, a town on the Tigris that had been protected under Turkish law since 1978. Eight of its monuments were cut free, driven two kilometres uphill on wheeled platforms and set down in a mown field; the rest of it is under the water.
New Hasankeyf is a grid of pale houses on a slope above the Tigris, laid out all at once and finished in the late 2010s. At the bottom of it there is a car park and a fenced field containing eight buildings that do not belong together: a fifteenth-century domed tomb faced in turquoise glazed brick, an Artuqid bathhouse, a minaret with no mosque under it, a scatter of smaller tombs. Each of them was cut from its foundations about two kilometres away and sixty metres lower down, braced in a steel frame, and driven here at walking pace.
Everything that was not moved is under the reservoir. The town had been protected in Turkish law as a first-degree archaeological conservation site since 1978. The campaign to save it advertised twelve thousand years of continuous habitation, which is a claim about the caves cut into the cliff rather than about the standing bazaar, and which both sides used loosely; the buildings above ground were mostly Artuqid, Ayyubid and Ottoman, which is old enough. What makes Hasankeyf worth understanding is not that it was lost. It is that it was lost in the open, over thirty years, against organised and well-funded opposition, in a process that produced an unprecedented international decision and then went ahead regardless.
What the dam is for
Ilısu is one of twenty-two dams in the Southeastern Anatolia Project, the GAP, which has been rearranging the Euphrates and Tigris basins inside Türkiye since the 1970s. The dam wall is 135 metres high; the powerhouse is rated at 1,200 megawatts; the reservoir covers about 313 square kilometres and holds roughly 10.4 billion cubic metres. Official figures from 2005 put 199 settlements wholly or partly in the flood zone, and the range usually quoted for people affected runs up to about 78,000, most of them Kurdish. Electricity is the visible product. The other one is control. The Tigris runs on into Iraq, and Türkiye has consistently held that a river rising in its territory is its own to manage — when the UN General Assembly adopted the Watercourses Convention in 1997 by 103 votes to three, Türkiye cast one of the three, alongside China and Burundi. The reservoir was filled through 2019 and 2020, which were among the worst drought years Iraq had recorded.
The guarantees that were withdrawn
The project needed European money and European machinery. In 2007 the export credit agencies of Germany, Austria and Switzerland guaranteed it, attaching 153 conditions on resettlement, environmental management and cultural heritage, drawn from World Bank standards. Independent monitors appointed under that agreement reported repeatedly that the conditions were not being met. In July 2009 all three governments cancelled their guarantees, and the European commercial banks behind roughly half a billion euros of lending followed them out. It was the first time public export credit support had ever been withdrawn from a project after approval on environmental and social grounds, and it is still the standard example in the literature. It also changed nothing on the ground: Türkiye refinanced the dam through its own banks, the Austrian engineering firm Andritz stayed in and supplied the turbines, and construction went on.
The withdrawal is usually written up as a victory for the campaign. It was a victory over a financing structure, and the dam turned out not to need that financing structure.
Eleven hundred tonnes on wheels
The Zeynel Bey tomb was built in 1475 for a son of Uzun Hasan, ruler of the Aq Qoyunlu, and there is nothing else quite like it in Anatolia — a cylindrical brick tower banded in interlocking turquoise and dark blue glaze. On 12 May 2017 it was jacked off its base and moved on self-propelled modular transporters: about 1,100 tonnes, roughly two kilometres, several hours. Seven more followed over the next two years, among them the bathhouse and the minaret of the El Rızk mosque, dated 1409. The engineering worked, and it deserves to be said plainly that it worked well. What it could not move was the reason those buildings stood where they did — a crossing point on the Tigris, a bazaar that grew around it, cave houses in the cliff above, and the piers of the Artuqid bridge of the 1110s standing in the current. Those are under the reservoir with the rest of the town.
The court that declined to decide
Five Turkish citizens — two professors, an architect-archaeologist, a journalist and a lawyer, all of whom had worked on the site — took the case to the European Court of Human Rights, against Türkiye, Austria and Germany together. Ahunbay and Others, application no. 6080/06, was decided in 2019. The Court did not rule that the dam was lawful, or that the loss was acceptable, or that the balance had been struck correctly. It ruled that it could not hear the complaint at all, because there was no European consensus — not even a discernible trend among Council of Europe states — from which a universal individual right to the protection of cultural heritage could be read into the Convention. The application was declared incompatible with the Convention and went no further. That is a more consequential outcome than a loss on the merits would have been: it is a finding that the legal instrument the campaign had assumed existed does not.
What there is to see now
The culture park takes forty minutes and earns them, partly because the tomb is a genuinely good building and partly because eight monuments standing in a mown field with information boards beside them is the clearest available statement of what the trade actually was. Then walk out to the viewpoint above the water. The citadel rock still stands clear, because it always stood high above the river; everything at its foot is gone. Boats run out onto the lake in summer and the operators will point at where the bazaar was. The new town has wide streets, a hospital and houses that many of the families moved into them are still paying for. Some of those families will tell you they are better off than they were, and they are not being disloyal when they say it. It is worth asking, and worth accepting whichever answer you get.