In a few hours a scheduled internal flight will bring me back to Istanbul. The stay on the banks of the Tigris lasted only 3 days. But at home (that means in Istanbul) there's a lot of work to do for me.
Free day today. I took advantage for a long walk through the town. I routed for almost the entire 5.5 km of ancient walls of Diyarbakır. Yesterday with Usam and Kadir already had traveled a lot. Judging by its ancient walls, Diyarbakır should have been a wonderful city, rich and important, especially when Armenians lived here, before their forced departure (may I call it genocide?). Today is a confused city on the outskirts of the Middle East, the emotional epicenter of the Kurdish question (as the economical Kurdish epicenter is now the Iraqi Kurdistan especially after the discovery of new oil deposits in the area between Kirkuk and Mosul). But Diyarbakır also has its importance, since the Tigris passes here and, as we now know from the World Water Forum just concluded in the last week-end in Istanbul, water was not declared a fundamental right, that in practice, here in Turkey, means the permission for Turkey to close at any time the tap of the Tigris and Euphrates and then dwindle them before they reach Syria and Iraq. And soon the water will have more value than oil.
Is for this reason that Erdoğan is trying the strategy of the carrot with the Kurds in Turkey after decades of violent and bloody repression? After all, usually in front of a rich dish of lentils an agreement is always possible.
And lentils are strong here, and indeed are the basic dish for those of us who do not eat meat. And then I was amazed by how they eat the parsley: in tufts, as if it was salad. To be honest it's not that bad, but after 3 days of lentils and parsley I miss (at least a little bit) the cosmopolitan Istanbul.
If the Tigris placid flows, here in Diyarbakır it flows even more placid. Indeed, it's only a stream. From the ancient walls of the city people sit, perched, and watch it like in trance. The Tigris here flows beneath the overhanging wall in the valley that in millennia it dug with his pass. Several hundred kilometers later its waters will arrive in Baghdad.
This morning, while I was comfortably seated in a chair of a barber shaving my beard, I was watching on TV the Iraqi president Jalal Talabani (Kurdish) officially receiving the Turkish president, Abdullah Gul. Perhaps, while the Kurds bite parsley in Diyarbakır, the Iraqi Kurds are already preparing the lentils with the water of the Tigris in exchange for something: we will discover what, maybe a short time after the upcoming Turkish local elections.
Free day today. I took advantage for a long walk through the town. I routed for almost the entire 5.5 km of ancient walls of Diyarbakır. Yesterday with Usam and Kadir already had traveled a lot. Judging by its ancient walls, Diyarbakır should have been a wonderful city, rich and important, especially when Armenians lived here, before their forced departure (may I call it genocide?). Today is a confused city on the outskirts of the Middle East, the emotional epicenter of the Kurdish question (as the economical Kurdish epicenter is now the Iraqi Kurdistan especially after the discovery of new oil deposits in the area between Kirkuk and Mosul). But Diyarbakır also has its importance, since the Tigris passes here and, as we now know from the World Water Forum just concluded in the last week-end in Istanbul, water was not declared a fundamental right, that in practice, here in Turkey, means the permission for Turkey to close at any time the tap of the Tigris and Euphrates and then dwindle them before they reach Syria and Iraq. And soon the water will have more value than oil.
Is for this reason that Erdoğan is trying the strategy of the carrot with the Kurds in Turkey after decades of violent and bloody repression? After all, usually in front of a rich dish of lentils an agreement is always possible.
And lentils are strong here, and indeed are the basic dish for those of us who do not eat meat. And then I was amazed by how they eat the parsley: in tufts, as if it was salad. To be honest it's not that bad, but after 3 days of lentils and parsley I miss (at least a little bit) the cosmopolitan Istanbul.
If the Tigris placid flows, here in Diyarbakır it flows even more placid. Indeed, it's only a stream. From the ancient walls of the city people sit, perched, and watch it like in trance. The Tigris here flows beneath the overhanging wall in the valley that in millennia it dug with his pass. Several hundred kilometers later its waters will arrive in Baghdad.
This morning, while I was comfortably seated in a chair of a barber shaving my beard, I was watching on TV the Iraqi president Jalal Talabani (Kurdish) officially receiving the Turkish president, Abdullah Gul. Perhaps, while the Kurds bite parsley in Diyarbakır, the Iraqi Kurds are already preparing the lentils with the water of the Tigris in exchange for something: we will discover what, maybe a short time after the upcoming Turkish local elections.
