Agence France Presse — English
September 29, 2006 Friday
In Nakhchivan, ancient water technology meets modern need
Simon Ostrovsky
SHAHTAHTY, Azerbaijan, Sept 29 2006
With the Araxes river winding below, workers on a hilltop in
Azerbaijan’s Nakhchivan exclave scrape debris from a clogged
waterway, reviving an ancient irrigation system invented by the
Persians 2,400 years ago.
Dressed in blue cover-alls, the men have been trained to maintain the
age-old Chehriz irrigation system to replace electric pumps to supply
the threadbare Azerbaijani town lower down the hillside.
Dozens of locals are now studying the technique after the last two
remaining experts came close to bringing its secrets to the grave.
International agencies are supporting the revival in the hope that
the water will breath life into the local economy and plug the stream
of locals fleeing this poverty-stricken corner of the Caucasus
Mountains.
"Nobody attended to the Chehriz in Soviet times," said Sarat Das,
head of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in
Azerbaijan, who is pushing the technique. "Mechanization replaced the
traditional systems," he said.
But the mechanized system of electric pumps was left high and dry
when a war with neighbour Armenia in the early 1990s cut off access
to the cheap electricity from that country’s nuclear power plant.
A tiny mountainous strip of land sandwiched between Armenia and Iran,
Nakhchivan is cut off completely from the rest of Azerbaijan, and
following the war, lost access to the Armenian capital Yerevan, a
mere 50 kilometers (30 miles) from its borders.
Unable to pay the higher prices for electricity imported from other
countries, the locals looked to the region’s 400 or so crumbling
Chehriz to turn their dusty fields green.
A long hand-made tunnel dug using a series of man-holes along a
sloping water table, the Chehriz requires no outside power source to
function.
Groundwater drains into a brick tunnel before being channeled into
the open in a village or a field where it can further be distributed
using a series of shallow canals.
Vilayat Ibrahimov, a community leader in the village of Yurdchu said
farmers used a rotation to share the Chehriz, blocking off one canal
to divert water to another in accordance to a schedule.
"Those fields down there, they were unusable a few years ago," said
Ibrahimov of a 400-year-old Chehriz that was recently re-opened to
the delight of locals.
Before the communists came to power there were 16 functioning Chehriz
in Yurdchu. Now there is one, but "there’s enough water for
everyone," he said.
The water is not pressurized, so it can’t be used to fill pipes and
pour out of faucets, but for Nakhchivan, where most villagers have
never had running water inside their homes, it is a significant
improvement.
Some 14 Chehriz have so far been rehabilitated under a scheme in
which communities are required to foot part of the bill for
reconstruction, according to the IOM, which is backing the project.
The rest is paid by the IOM and the Swiss Development and Cooperation
Agency.
Devoid of any significant vegetation, the region saw its population
stream across the borders to Turkey and Iran when the Iron Curtain
was lifted.
Nobody is certain how many people have left, the figures are a
closely guarded secret in the local administration, but the streets
of the regional capital Nakhchivan are all but empty.
The IMO identified a lack of water in the region’s villages as one of
the hardships compelling farmers to abandon their fields.
"The major problem was water and that the Chehriz was dry," prompting
people to leave the villages, Das said of the town where IOM fixed
its first Chehriz.
In championing the Chehriz, the IOM has saved the age-old technology
from the brink of extinction by tapping the knowledge of two Chan
Chans or Chehriz technicians, a 65-year-old and a 72-year-old, who
remembered the skills from their youth.
They have since trained 100 more young men and the project has spread
to other parts of Azerbaijan, with some of the IOM-employed Chan
Chans rebuilding Chehriz in their spare time.
"This skill which could have died with these two people can be
retained," he said.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress