Ruins

The first thing that we checked out across the river was a tomb of a guy named Zeynel. It was built in the 15th century. It has a lawn of grass growing on the top of it. As with the other stuff that we saw, we didn’t know the whole story behind it. We got mixed reports from people in town. It will be interesting to do some more research on these sites back at home and to learn the real story.

Next to the new bridge is the Old Bridge to the city. There are two huge pillars coming out of the river. This bridge was built during Byzantine times. One guy in town said that it was destroyed by Genghis Khan. I’ll find out about that later.

While we were on this side of the river, we had a bunch of cute little Kurdish kids running around with us.

The castle up on the hill above town was absolutely amazing. This was a strategic spot that had been occupied since Byzantine times, but these ruins were Armenian. There are huge cliffs all around, and amazing ruins of a palace on top with wonderful views of the river. The ruins are extensive and it took us about half an hour to walk around them. There are tons of graveyards up there as well.

One of the really cool things about this area is that there are caves dug into the walls everywhere you go. Underneath the ruins was a whole city of cave dwellings. A man in town told us that 35 years ago there wasn’t a city in Hasankeyf, and the whole population lived in the caves. That was in 1970! It was absolutely amazing to think that so recently this whole valley of people were cave dwellers!

We had free run of these ruins all day and the only other person we saw up there was a very furry Kurdish man who was singing at the top of a cliff. At the high point of the ruins was a grassy area with an old dead tree growing out of the middle. Looking down the valley, we could see a range of dark hills. Just over those hills, about 60 miles away was Iraq. Hasankeyf was a completely different world, but you couldn’t help but look at those hills and think of all the heavy stuff going on over there. We could have made a raft and floated down the Tigris right into Iraq.