Halfeti

The boat engine cuts out and the noise stops all at once. Now you hear only water knocking against the hull and echoing off a rock wall. The cliffs on both sides are pale limestone, streaked grey and gold, and they throw the sound back at you. The water is green and very still. It smells of river weed and warm stone. Somewhere above, swallows cut across the gorge. Then someone points ahead, and everyone on the boat goes quiet.

A minaret is standing in the water. Not beside it — in it. The stone shaft rises straight out of the green surface with no building attached, no courtyard, no street. Its balcony is intact. Below the waterline, the mosque it belonged to is still there, along with the houses that surrounded it. This is the clearest image of what happened at Halfeti, and once you have seen it, the rest of the landscape starts to make sense.

The Euphrates runs through this valley, and in the 1990s a dam was built downstream at Birecik. When the reservoir filled in 1999, the water rose behind it and covered the lower parts of Halfeti and several neighbouring villages. Houses, gardens, mosques, cemeteries and terraced fields went under. Families were compensated and most moved to a new settlement built for them on higher ground. Some stayed on the upper streets, above the new waterline.

Think about what that meant in practice. People packed what they could carry from houses their grandparents had built. Some moved graves. Neighbours who had lived on the same lane were assigned separate plots in a new town with straight roads and no river. Others simply climbed the hill and rebuilt fifty metres higher. Ask anyone here over fifty and they can tell you exactly which part of the water is above their old front door.

The boats go upstream to Savaşan, another village that went under. You pass close to a slope where an old graveyard runs down into the water and stops. Roofs and wall fragments break the surface in low water. A second minaret stands in the shallows there. The boatmen slow down, and people take photographs, and nobody talks much. The water is clear enough that you can sometimes see stonework continuing below.

Further up, the gorge narrows and a fortress appears on a rock promontory where a side stream meets the Euphrates. This is Rumkale. Its walls run along the cliff edge, and there are cisterns, a rock-cut stairway, and the shell of a church. From the middle of the twelfth century until the late thirteenth, this fortress was the seat of the head of the Armenian church, chosen precisely because it was so hard to reach. The water level today makes it look almost easy.

Halfeti is also known for a rose. Growers here raise a very dark red rose, so deep that in strong light it reads as black, and it is sold locally as the black rose. Growers say the local soil and water produce the colour, and that it only appears properly in spring. The plants are cultivated in small numbers in gardens rather than in large fields. You will see the flower on tea glasses, soap, jam labels and shop signs everywhere in town.

Look at the slopes above the water and you will see terraces, some abandoned, some still worked. Pistachio trees grow well on this dry limestone, and so do olives and grapes. Pistachio hulls stain your fingers a rusty colour if you handle them fresh. Farmers here lost the best flat land, which was low and close to the river, and kept the harder ground higher up. That is why the agriculture you see now clings to slopes.

In the town itself, walk the lanes just above the waterline. The old houses are built of cut limestone with flat roofs and small windows, and some have carved doorframes. Several have been converted into guesthouses and cafés with terraces hanging directly over the reservoir. Cats sleep on the walls. In summer the town fills with visitors, mostly from other parts of Turkey, and in winter it is nearly empty and the water turns grey.

It is worth remembering which river this is. The Euphrates begins in the mountains of eastern Turkey and runs south through Syria and Iraq to the Gulf. The plains it waters supported some of the earliest cities anywhere. Now a series of dams sits along its upper course, generating power and irrigating land that used to be dry. Halfeti is one small, visible cost of that system, and the town has turned that cost into its main attraction.

Get back on the boat in the late afternoon if you can. The cliffs go warm orange, the water flattens, and the engine noise bounces between the rock faces. Fish break the surface near the shallows. Look at the line where the pale rock meets the green water and follow it with your eyes — that line did not exist before 1999. Everything below it was somewhere people lived.

Before you go, find a spot on the quay and sit with your feet near the edge. The water is calm and slightly opaque and it moves very slowly. Behind you, the town continues its ordinary day: tea glasses, a motorbike, someone calling a name. Under you, a village is holding still. Both of those things are true at the same time here, and you are sitting exactly on the line between them.