Mehmet Hanefi, 76, says the Kralkızı Dam, which opened in 1997, flooded prime farmland along the Maden Stream, a tributary of the Tigris River. “We have relatives in Gölbaşı village, which is on the other side of the dam lake,” he says. “We used to visit that village via footpaths, but now we travel by boat between the two villages.” What hasn’t poured into the Tigris and Euphrates rivers? Raindrops. Blood. Snowmelt. Ashes. Hope. Pesticides. Ink. (When the Mongols plundered Baghdad in 1258 A.D., they tossed so many books from the city’s libraries into the Tigris that the currents ran black with ink.) Dreams. Stories. Time. Reporting for this article was supported by the Pulitzer Center. The photographer Murat Yazar understands this. He knows that rivers are the biographers of landscape. That they cradle within their currents a swirling distillation of every incident and anecdote that has transpired in the inhabited landscapes they course through. And few rivers carry a headier and more sobering brew of history — tales of human woe and triumph — than the Tigris and Euphrates, the fabled waterways that pour through the heartlands of Eurasian civilization, through the Fertile Crescent, from their chilly headwaters in the mountains of Turkey through vast watersheds in Syria, Kuwait, and Iran, to finally empty into Persian Gulf at the sweltering marshland shores of Iraq. Ten years ago, I walked with Yazar along the banks of Tigris at the antique settlement of Hasankeyf in Turkey. A local shepherd named Çoban Ali Ayhan sang for us there an old ballad that was more like a cry of pure agony. His voice bounded down the sandstone canyons of the Tigris, with a song that was a hymn to true love, which is to say, to love unrequited. It was an ode […]