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Editorial of may 2000 "It
is an ominous peace, more disastrous than any war".
We can see two
piers of bridge, ruined and truncated. We can see just their base and these
ragged stones emerged from the blue-green waters of the Tigris.
The bridge is in the town of Hasan Kayf (or Hisn Kayfa). Hasan Kayf is a Kurdish town between Batman and Mardin. Hasan Kayf was a princely town in the XIIth century and the residence of Artukids, when the Turkmens of the land protected and embellished Diyarbakir, Mardin, Hisn Kayfa, Mayyafariqin and Kharput, instead of destroying them by fire or water. In 1132, the Kurdish Ayyubids took the town. It was The Mongols sacked it in 1260 and from that time the princely fortress slept gradually, far from the roads of caravans, hardly troubled by the passage of armies. Tomorrow Hasan Kayf will disappear, sunken by one of the dams that Turkey wants to built in the "south-eastern Anatolia". A campaign have been started for the preservation of the valley and we can see the destroyed bridge on every posters. But don't mistake,
if from
there we look up and around,
At the top, facing the residence of a Kurdish prince, there are remains of the artukid palace, a fabulous building, wound around the mountain : a gate ornamented with dragon-tails, large rooms builted with stones and bricks and Persian arches, some pavilions and a paved yard. And we look down the citadel, we can see the invisible bridge springing on the waters of the Tigris, and the gardens on the bank flowering because of Tigris. And up the mountains, half enclosed in natural caves and half in the old parts of the palaces, the troglodyte people are still living here with their dogs, their chickens and their sheeps. On Sunday, we have seen families climbed up for picnic and get pictures of the condemned valley. They showed us the bridge, the plain, the tombs and the blossomed trees. They told us : "We have to save all that things." Turkey, at present, worries a lot for the Chinese Uygurs. Because they have racial, religous and linguistic links with them. Uygurs have to be a bridge of frienship between Turkey and China, that is a Turkish diplomat have said. Sandrine Alexie - Photos Roxane |
We
can see these isolated columns crossing the river until the bank, we can see a
fragment of arche that still raises from sand, a lonely arche, nevermore bounded
with anything, and this hardly visible and quite aerial bridge is a strange and
pathetic vision. 
there is more than an ghostly bridge to save : the
valley at first, incredibly beautiful, with the turquoise waters of the Tigris,
running between the mountain and pastures in flowers, with two small turbeh
(princes' tombs), vaulted and
brick-ornamented, set between the green patches and the fair sand of the banks ;
there is the bridge then, the town and two mosques with their round and ribbed
minarets, alike to the one of Mardin, where storks nest ; and then the waters of
the Tigris go deep in a canyon between two mountains that the ancient passage of
water had wrinkled and gullied. The canyon and the mountains are riddled with
caves, carved steps and terraces, for Hasan Kayf is a troglodyte town, still
inhabited by Kurds but for how long time ?