HASANKEYF, Turkey — The chugging of heavy machinery echoed through Hasankeyf, an ancient town on the banks of the Tigris in southeastern Turkey on a recent Sunday. The settlement, soon to be inundated by the waters of a nearby dam, was no stranger to earth-moving works over its 12,000-year history, but the diggers' task on this day was particularly gloomy. With the town’s residents already resettled elsewhere, the time had now come to move the dead.

The relocation of graves punctuates Hasankeyf having reached the end of the road after years of protests and legal battles to halt construction of the Ilisu Dam. The saga began for local residents in the late 1960s when a group of strangers arrived by mule. The locals had initially mistaken the men for tourists, but they turned out to be engineers dispatched to take water-level measurements of the Tigris. In 1980, Turkish officials gave the go-ahead for a hydroelectric dam as part of a massive development project for the impoverished, predominately Kurdish southeast. The Tigris, the lifeblood of Hasankeyf for millennia, would now drown the town, along with its unique heritage dating back to Neolithic times.

Mired in controversy, the process dragged on for years, until Ankara tendered the project in 1997. Another decade passed amid funding snags as a number of European companies and lenders reneged on the project. With Ankara forced to pay the bill, construction finally kicked off in 2006. The point of no return arrived earlier this year, when the process of filling the dam got underway after postponement due to downstream protests of water shortages in drought-stricken Iraq in 2018.

At the cemetery in Hasankeyf, earth movers were opening graves in the presence of surviving relatives. Two men descended into the pits to collect bones. With utmost care, they wrapped the remains in a shroud and placed them in coffins, which were then taken to a burial ground near New Hasankeyf, the settlement built for the displaced locals.