Hasankeyf on the milky Tigris. This - old man-made caves, previously dwellings - is a totally inadequate image for this town. This one not by me is more like it, but I was on the wrong side of the bus and we didn't stop. It's one of these Roman-Byzantine-Silk-Road-Ottoman places, sacked by Mongols but with rich mediaeval and earlier remains. It's also on a spectacular stretch of the river, with high vertical cliffs (some pitted with cave cities) on one side - much higher than this one above.

I have to spend some time here, and soon, as the place is under imminent threat from the Ilisu Dam, which will put much of it underwater, while plans to move the monuments to another location seem inadequate. In 2008 Hasankeyf was put on the WMF Endangered Sites list, and European creditors for the dam(n) project suspended their involvement. Turkey is proceeding with the project independently (more or less). There are not only cultural but also environmental and human rights issues involved: some 185 villages will also be affected, and there are suggestions that this is particularly an anti-Kurdish move. The dam will have effects that reach the lower length of the Tigris, of course, so into Iraq including to the Marshes.

On the other hand, the Southeastern Anatolia Project of which the Ilisu Dam is a part is a huge, integrated regional development project (and this isn't even Europe...) which aims to revitalise through irrigation, hydro-electric power generation, jobs and infrastructure, in an area that (people tell me) has been neglected and sidelined by Ankara in the past. Several dam(n)s are already extant, including the Birecik Dam which put Zeugma underwater, with several more in the planning, and Ilisu is the largest in the Tigris basin and the third largest overall. Certainly amid baked landscapes there are rich green irrigated fields in Turkish Mesopotamia, and Turkey is feeding not only itself but also Iraqi Kurdistan, as the shop shelves and lorry queues at the border show, and perhaps the rest of Iraq too for all I know. And other places. Turkey plans ambitiously and trades well and you have to admire that.

Anyway - Hasankeyf.