OUT OF EDEN WALK

In my childhood, I fished and swam in the Euphrates River. I even drank its fresh, clean water. Many streams originating in Turkey's eastern provinces—the Ağrı, Erzincan, Sivas, Tunceli, Malatya, and others—feed the Euphrates, which flows 2,700 kilometers from its source in the Anatolian highlands through Syria and Iraq before emptying into the Persian Gulf. Its fluvial companion, the Tigris, makes a similar, but shorter, journey from eastern Turkey to the gulf.

The lands along the Tigris and Euphrates were the center of the ancient world, the so-called cradle of civilization, where humans developed writing and agriculture. For thousands of years, the rivers ran freely, their fertile valleys sustaining farming communities and a bounty of animal and plant life.

Not anymore.

Government initiatives have transformed the region. Turkey’s Southeast Anatolia Project, begun in 1977, involved constructing 22 dams and 19 hydroelectric power plants in the Euphrates and Tigris basins. The Keban, Karakaya, Atatürk, Birecik, and Karkamış dams have gone up on the Euphrates; on the Tigris, Turkey has built the Devegeçidi, Ilısu, Batman, Dicle, Kralkızı, and Garzan dams, and Iraq, a dam at Mosul.

Hundreds of settlements, natural areas, and archaeological remains have been submerged. Pollution has fouled the waters. People who for generations have farmed lands now flooded by reservoirs were compelled to leave their homes and move to crowded cities. The dam barriers prevent fish from migrating and reproducing and interrupt the flow of life-giving nutrients. Plant communities have vanished beneath the reservoirs; wild animals and birds have been displaced.

These engineering projects on the rivers that imprinted me with childhood memories have shaped my geography physically, culturally and spiritually. As a photojournalist, I felt it was essential to document the transformation that has occurred. I began shooting this March, but the work ended prematurely five months later. Authorities in Iraq detained me for eight days in a Kurdish security forces prison, and after my release, I crossed back into Turkey.

A major goal of the dam building was to irrigate some 1.8 million hectares of farmland. This has caused irreversible effects. With river waters diverted to farm fields in Turkey, downstream communities in Iraq and Syria are starved of water—a crisis exacerbated by decreases in winter snowfall, in part because of climate change, that have reduced the flow of the Tigris and Euphrates, especially during the summer and autumn months. In those regions, higher temperatures—climate change again—have increased evaporation from reservoirs and irrigated areas, raising humidity levels and intensifying rainstorms. Last year, severe flooding in the Turkish cities of Adıyaman and Şanlıurfa killed 21 people and damaged more than 3,000 houses and shops.

Meanwhile, pollution fouls the waters. Some of it is waste seeping from mines that use toxic chemicals in their extraction process. A landslide on February 13, 2024, at a gold mine operated by Anagold Mining in the İliç district of Erzincan, killed nine workers trapped underground. Some 10 million cubic meters of soil laced with cyanide and sulfuric acid spilled into the Euphrates basin.

In Turkey, much of the visible legacy of our forebears whose innovations gave us civilization’s cradle, has been wiped out. Millennia-old archaeological sites—such as Nevali Çori (early Neolithic) and the cities of Hasankeyf (8000 BC), Commagene-Samsat (3000 BC), and Zeugma (third century BC)—have been drowned. When conditions are exceptionally dry and water levels in the reservoirs drop, vestiges of these ancient wonders can be seen.

All this damage in the Euphrates and Tigris basins—to people’s lives, to natural systems, to irreplaceable cultural patrimony—seems impossible to repair. But some of it could be if the governments of Turkey, Syria, and Iraq were to collaborate in a spirit of goodwill on environmental and scientific initiatives to help prevent further degradation.

Murat Yazar is a walking partner of the Out of Eden Walk who traversed 1,200 kilometers on foot through Turkey and Georgia. The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting supported this photo project.