Queen of the Euphrates in Halfeti

The day trip debacle to Harran left me in a pickle.

Harran hadn’t been a part of my original Trapped in Turkey itinerary. The day trip I REALLY wanted to do from Urfa was to Halfeti, a drowned town famous for its black roses, Euphrates boat rides, and submerged minaret.

Halfeti, however, is nearly two hours away from Urfa, and we couldn’t find a bus that went there. The only option was, again, to drive with the owner of our guesthouse.

I was still upset about the previous day’s miscommunication and reluctant to pay more money to this guy. But there was no other way to get there. We haggled the price down a bit, and it probably would have been reasonable, had we not felt so taken advantage of the day before.

Everyone was dissatisfied with the deal, but we– two of us, the guesthouse owner, and his wife– piled into the car and drove two hours past pistachio fields to Halfeti.

Old Halfeti no longer exists. The town was taken out by a dam that raised the water level above the roofs; the residents moved to higher ground and called their new town New Halfeti (Yeni Halfeti, in Turkish.) However, the old town is still a draw– the eerie sight of the local mosque’s minaret rising out of the Euphrates river is a main attraction of the new town’s popular boat rides.

Our guide found a boat for us but the price quoted was four times as high as he’d originally told us. The trust between us was pretty well frayed at this point, so we went off to find a better deal. My Turkish isn’t great, but I know enough to haggle prices, and quickly found a cheaper option.

Arguments ensued. Our guide was obviously angry, and we got the sense that he’d made a deal with the first boat. Maybe he was planning on taking a commission. Either way, he still got the last jab– we found out at the end of the boat ride that we’d not only paid for ourselves, but also for the guide and his wife.

Everyone was a bit annoyed.

But then the boat set sail and a cool breeze cut through the 100 degree heat and the sprawling cerulean of the Euphrates River surrounded me. Sometimes the smallest facts become “pinch me” moments; floating on a river that I’d heard about so often in school was one of them. Giant sand-colored cliffs rose majestically above the water.

The boat blasted music, shifting from Rihanna to Kurdish wedding music and back, the sound echoing off the river and the looming cliffs.

I moved to the bow of the boat and felt like the Queen of the Euphrates. Ruins crumbled off the sides of the cliffs, oozing with history that our “guide” did not bother to explain to us. The air was cool and the sun beat down and I glided along, content after such a travel debacle to reach this place.

In the hot Turkish summer, dryness and drought had brought down the water level at Old Halfeti, but the minaret of the underwater mosque was as bizarre as the pictures I’d seen. How strange it must be to have your home, your grandparents’ home, submerged by the government and then reappropriated as a tourist attraction. The Kurdish pop songs blared out, drowning out my contemplation, and we floated on and on and eventually back to our beginning.

Was Halfeti worth the hassle to get there? That’s questionable. The trip ended up costing more than I’d planned to spend and our “guide” was grumpy, manipulative, and drove in reverse on the highway twice.

But I like to focus on the positive and I refused to let the negativity surrounding the journey get in the way of enjoying Halfeti’s main attraction: the boat ride down the Euphrates. I truly enjoyed that oasis and coolness and calmness in the middle sweltery Southeast Turkey. If you rent a car to explore this region of the country, I highly recommend exploring this strange little place. If not, it’s still fascinating– just know that getting there might be a whole adventure in itself.