Hasankeyf: Twelve Thousand Years Underwater

At a Glance

Hasankeyf was a rock city on the bank of the Tigris, in the mostly Kurdish southeast of modern Turkey. Most sources push the traces of settlement here back some twelve thousand years.
The chain of the name is clear: from the Syriac kifo (rock) came the Arabic Hısn Keyfâ, meaning rock fortress. In Kurmancî, the northern dialect of Kurdish, it is Heskîf; in Turkish, Hasankeyf.
About four thousand cave dwellings were cut into the rock. The castle cliff, the valleys and the bazaar were one single fabric.
The city was the Artuqid capital between 1102 and 1232. The main arch of its stone bridge over the Tigris spanned about forty metres, among the widest spans of its age.
A branch of the Ayyubids ruled here for centuries with the title melik (king). The Er-Rızk Mosque dates from 1409; the Zeynel Bey Tomb from the Aqqoyunlu period.
The idea of the Ilısu Dam became a project in 1954; the foundation was laid in 2006. In 2009 Germany, Austria and Switzerland withdrew their credit guarantees because 153 conditions had not been met.
The dam began holding water between 19 and 22 July 2019. In 2020 the lower city went under.
The Zeynel Bey Tomb was moved on 12 May 2017, all 1,100 tons of it, two kilometres to a new site. In all, seven or eight monumental buildings were carried to the new ground.
The caves, the bazaar fabric and the bridge piers could not be moved. The townspeople settled in a new Hasankeyf.
This article is not an indictment. It is a record of testimony. The dates, the decisions and the moved stones do the speaking.

Whoever goes to Hasankeyf today boards a boat. The motor slows, and the boatman reaches his hand out toward the water. "That was the bazaar." The water is green and still. "There was a bakery there. The school was there. Our house was a little further along."

A hand pointing under the water. Nothing it points to can be seen. Only the upper part of the castle cliff stands above the surface; the caves that once looked down on the river from a height are now a few steps from the water.

In the city the boatman describes, people lived for twelve thousand years. They carved caves, raised a bridge, set up minarets, planted gardens. Since 2020, fish have moved through it. This article opens that city's ledger one more time, before it closes.

The Name of the Rock: From Hısn Keyfâ to Heskîf

Sometimes the oldest document a place has is its name. This city's name carries language in layers.

The chain runs like this. In Syriac, the region's old language, kifo means rock. The Arabs recorded the city as Hısn Keyfâ: rock fortress, rock castle. The name was whittled a little in every language that followed. Kurmancî-speaking Kurds said Heskîf. In Turkish it became Hasankeyf, and popular speech even found a "Hasan" inside it. Yet there is no person in the name. There is rock. Dr. Mehrdad R. Izady, in his handbook The Kurds, names the city by its medieval form Hisn Keyfâ and its ancient record Caphen.

Why does the name matter so much? Because the city's summary is in it. This was the city of the rock. The house was rock, the castle was rock, the stairway was rock. People carved the rock before they ever built in dressed stone. Researchers have counted about four thousand cave dwellings here. Inside the cliff there were passages, water cisterns, stables, places of worship. The city was not built on top of the land. It was built into it.

The Layers of Twelve Thousand Years

Twelve thousand years is a heavy claim. What holds it up? The mound here, a hill formed by settlements laid one over another, has been excavated; together with its surroundings it takes the traces of habitation down to the Neolithic, the first age of farming. Most sources meet at this depth. The exact figure is argued over, and a range of ten to twelve thousand years is cited. This much is enough: people were living here thousands of years before writing was invented.

In the written ages the city passed from hand to hand. It became a frontier fortress between Rome and the Sasanians, then passed to Arab administrations. The great leap came in 1102: three years after Jerusalem fell to the Crusaders, the Artuqid dynasty made this its capital. In the Artuqid century, 1102 to 1232, the city gained its bridge, its palace and its walls. The main arch of the stone bridge over the Tigris spanned about forty metres; with its side openings it counts among the largest bridges of its age. The caravan roads crossed by this bridge. The city was the lock on a pass.

Then came the Ayyubids. A branch of Saladin's family ruled this rock for centuries with the title melik, that is king, even after the empire's great stage had closed; that famous dynasty's story is the subject of another article, Saladin, the Kurd behind the legend. The stones of this period are still names today: the Sultan Süleyman Mosque, the Koç Mosque, and the Er-Rızk Mosque of 1409. Slender minarets rose above the bazaar. Şerefxan, in the Sharafnama he completed in 1597, gave the meliks of Hısn Keyf their place; this city is in the pages of the first Kurdish history too.

One layer more: the Aqqoyunlu. Zeynel, the son of Uzun Hasan, the Aqqoyunlu ruler, died in the 1473 battle of Otlukbeli. His father had a tomb built for him at Hasankeyf. Cylindrical, faced with turquoise and deep-blue glazed brick, this building brought a Central Asian style down to the bank of the Tigris. Its like is hard to find in Anatolia.

When Evliya Çelebi Stopped at Hasankeyf

One of the city's early witnesses is a traveller. Evliya Çelebi went north from Baghdad in 1656; by way of Amadiya and Cizre he stopped at Hasankeyf, then returned by the Mosul road. Martin van Bruinessen's study lays out this route step by step. Why should one passing stop matter?

Here is the tender part. This chapter of the Seyahatname, Evliya's ten-volume Book of Travels, was never finished. He wrote his notes but could not complete the chapter; in the manuscript there are pages left blank, headings never filled in. According to Bruinessen, Evliya kept adding to this notebook until his death. A half-finished page in a notebook and a bazaar drowned under water: two absences that resemble each other. We told this traveller's whole journey through the Kurdish lands in a separate article: Evliya Çelebi in Kurdistan.

The Ilısu Dam: The Long Shadow of a Decision

Now come to our own century, and let only the dates speak. How does a dam become an argument that lasts for decades?

The idea of a great dam on the Tigris was born in the 1950s and became a project in 1954. In 1982 it entered the Southeastern Anatolia Project; in 1997 it was taken into the investment programme. The foundation ceremony was held on 5 August 2006. The aim was energy: Ilısu was to be one of Turkey's largest hydroelectric plants.

The objections are as old as the project. Archaeologists, architects, ecologists and local people repeated the same sentence for years: this lake will cover an irreplaceable heritage. The campaign went international. In 2007 the agreement with European credit institutions was tied to 153 conditions on cultural heritage, the environment and resettlement. The conditions were not met. The documents are clear: on 7 July 2009 the governments of Germany, Austria and Switzerland withdrew their credit guarantees, and the banks involved cancelled the loan. To remove a dam project from international financing on this ground was a rarely seen decision.

The project still did not stop. Turkey carried on with domestic resources. Between 19 and 22 July 2019 the gates closed and the dam began to hold water. On the number of people the lake displaced, the sources diverge: the campaigning organisations spoke of some two hundred settlements and more than 70,000 people, while the official figures are lower. Whatever the range, tens of thousands of lives changed place.

Moved Monuments: A Tomb's Journey

On the morning of 12 May 2017, Hasankeyf offered a rare sight. The five-hundred-year-old Zeynel Bey Tomb, set inside a concrete case, had been mounted on a platform running on hundreds of wheels. The total load was about 1,100 tons. The platform crept along a purpose-built road at a few hundred metres an hour, for two kilometres. Some four hours later the tomb stood in its new place: the Culture Park.

This was the first large operation in Turkey to move a monument whole. Others followed. The Artuqid Bath was moved in the summer of 2018; its mass was reckoned at 1,500 tons. Teams took the Imam Abdullah Zaviye, a small dervish lodge, away in pieces. The minaret of the Er-Rızk Mosque and its 1,700-ton main body travelled too. The Kızlar Mosque, parts of the Sultan Süleyman Mosque and the castle's Middle Gate completed the list. In all, seven or eight monumental buildings migrated from the old city to the new shore.

As engineering, these moves are a genuine achievement, and that should be granted. But a question must be set down beside it: into how many pieces can a city be cut and still be rescued? The tomb was saved. The valley the tomb looked out over is under the water.

What Could Not Be Moved?

The list of what could be moved is short. The list of what could not is the city itself.

Four thousand caves could not be moved. The stairways inside the cliff, the cisterns, the carved rooms could not be moved. The bazaar street, the shade of the century-old plane tree in front of the coffee house, the river-facing windows of the houses could not be moved. The giant piers of the Artuqid bridge stayed where they stood; the water rose over them as well. Today the fabric of the lower city is carried only by photographs, measured drawings and memory.

Dr. Izady set down an early and hard record on this. Nearly every dam built in Kurdistan, he writes, drowns a part of Kurdish history. He gives an example: the Atatürk Dam on the Euphrates had already covered ancient Samsat entirely. Dr. Izady counts the mansions, the madrasas, the mosques and the caravanserais lost at Hasankeyf, and he records the international reaction; he writes that anger overflowed in the region at the inadequacy of the last-minute rescue excavations. He does not hide his own view: these dams are mostly for electricity alone, and the same energy could be produced with far less destruction. This is the view Dr. Izady argues, and we set the record down as his.

One more note for the record: Hasankeyf was never nominated to the UNESCO World Heritage List. Conservation bodies argued that the city met almost all the listing criteria; no application was ever filed. The neighbouring file upstream on the same river did enter the list, in 2015: the Diyarbakır walls and the Hevsel Gardens. One river, two fates. We told that story too: the Diyarbakır walls and the Hevsel Gardens.

As the Waters Rose: 2019-2020

Water does not swallow a city in a single night. How does it happen? It rises for months, centimetre by centimetre. So it was at Hasankeyf.

After the gates closed in the summer of 2019, the lake advanced valley by valley. The administration cleared the town, and the people moved into housing built a few kilometres away, in the new Hasankeyf. The shopkeepers of the old bazaar pulled down the last shutters. Photographers and documentary-makers poured into the city in those months, and the last images of old Hasankeyf gathered like a farewell album. Through 2020 the lower city went entirely under the water.

Life goes on today in the new Hasankeyf: the housing, the school, the Culture Park where the moved monuments stand in a row, the museum. Boat tours run on the lake, and the boatmen point out the streets beneath the water from memory. For some this is a story of development; for others it is a wound that will not close. To write both on the same page is what testimony requires.

The Duty of Memory: What Stays Above the Water?

So what should be done now? The rhetoric of anger is easy. Responsibility is harder.

The name of responsibility is the record. Hasankeyf's measurements, its photographs, its excavation reports, its oral testimonies lie scattered; to gather them, digitise them and make them reachable is the second rescue operation, the one after the water. The boatman's "that was the bazaar" is a document too, and so is an old woman's account of her cave house. If oral testimony is not recorded, it drowns a second time.

And there is a debt of telling. A child born today might take Hasankeyf for nothing but a lake. That child must be told the chain of the name: kifo, Hısn Keyfâ, Heskîf. That child must be told about the bridge's forty-metre arch, the four thousand caves, the journey of the 1,100-ton tomb. The waters rise; the record remains. That is this site's concern as well: to carry the memory that stays above the water.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where was Hasankeyf, and why did it matter so much? It was a rock city on the bank of the Tigris, in Batman province in the Kurdish southeast of Turkey. The traces of settlement reach back some twelve thousand years; the city carried an unbroken run of layers, from the Roman-Sasanian frontier to the Artuqid capital, from the Ayyubid meliks to the Aqqoyunlu. With about four thousand cave dwellings, its monumental bridge and its mosques, it was reckoned an open-air museum.

Where does the name Hasankeyf come from? From the Syriac kifo, meaning rock. The Arabic records give it as Hısn Keyfâ, that is, rock fortress. The Kurmancî form is Heskîf; in Turkish it turned into Hasankeyf.

When did the city go underwater? The Ilısu Dam began holding water between 19 and 22 July 2019, and through 2020 the lower city of old Hasankeyf went entirely beneath the lake. The upper part of the castle cliff remains above the surface.

What happened to the Zeynel Bey Tomb? The Aqqoyunlu-era tomb was moved on 12 May 2017, all 1,100 tons of it, two kilometres on a special platform, and set down in the Culture Park. The Artuqid Bath, the Er-Rızk Mosque and the Imam Abdullah Zaviye were moved as well.

Was everything saved? No. Seven or eight monumental buildings were moved; the cave dwellings, the bazaar fabric, the bridge piers and the rock city itself stayed in place and are under water. What was rescued was pieces of the city, not the city whole.

Sources and Further Reading

Primary sources (from the Bedel Boseli Collection):

Dr. Mehrdad R. Izady, The Kurds: A Concise Handbook (4th edition): Hisn Keyfâ as an Ayyubid capital, the effect of dams on Kurdish heritage, and the Hasankeyf record (the "Natural Resources: Water" section).
Martin van Bruinessen, "Kurdistan in the 16th and 17th Centuries, as Reflected in Evliya Çelebi's Seyahatname", The Journal of Kurdish Studies 3 (2000): Evliya's 1656 southern tour and the unfinished Hasankeyf notebook.
Şerefxan Bidlisi, Sharafnama (Dr. Mehrdad R. Izady edition): the section on the meliks of Hısn Keyf.

Social Media Summaries

The following summaries are ready to share; copy and use them.

People lived there for twelve thousand years: they carved caves, raised a bridge, set up minarets. Since 2020 it has been under the water. The documented farewell of Hasankeyf: bedelboseli.com/en/hasankeyf-twelve-thousand-years-underwater
12 May 2017: the five-hundred-year-old Zeynel Bey Tomb travelled two kilometres on wheels, all 1,100 tons of it. The tomb was saved; the valley it looked over was not: bedelboseli.com/en/hasankeyf-twelve-thousand-years-underwater
Evliya Çelebi stopped at Hasankeyf in 1656. That chapter of his Book of Travels was never finished: blank pages, headings left empty. The city's fate came to resemble his notebook: bedelboseli.com/en/hasankeyf-twelve-thousand-years-underwater
7 July 2009: Germany, Austria and Switzerland pulled out of the Ilısu loan because 153 conditions went unmet. The dam was built anyway. The Hasankeyf file, told in dates and decisions: bedelboseli.com/en/hasankeyf-twelve-thousand-years-underwater
Syriac kifo: rock. Arabic Hısn Keyfâ: rock fortress. Kurmancî Heskîf. The thousand-year chain of a name, and the last century of a city: bedelboseli.com/en/hasankeyf-twelve-thousand-years-underwater