Habibe Sacik sat at the banks of the Tigris River and wept.
“I came to see my village one last time,” she said a few days before the waters of the controversial Ilisu Dam inundated her village along with dozens of others. “Wherever you go, how far you travel, home is home. You feel its loss.”
Sacik is one of two women who tell the story of the region through the eyes of women, in a new documentary called “Siya Ave,” which means “Shadow of the Water” in Kurdish. Traveling along the banks of the Tigris River, the two women tell of their lives impacted by the Turkish government’s pet project in southeastern Anatolia, the Ilisu Dam. Ilisu is Turkey’s largest hydroelectric dam and the crown jewel of the Southeastern Anatolia Project. But it also submerges Hasankeyf, a 12,000-year-old town in the southeastern province of Batman and home to many of the civilizations of Mesopotamia. Some 80,000 people have already left their ancestors’ lands and reluctantly moved to the new settlements offered, some 10 kilometers (6 miles) away.
Sacik’s village, Celtikbasi, is not in internationally known Hasankeyf but further into the east, in the Kurtalan district of Siirt. Located in the Tigris Valley, Celtikbasi, along with half a dozen nearby villages, was vacated last year, too.