Photo Of A Huge Loko, In Occupied Nakhitchevan

[Aram.Garabedian2]

http://www.djavakhk.com/galerie/disp_img.php?id_img=1439

[Aram.Garabedian2]

http://www.djavakhk.com/galerie/disp_img.php?id_img=1439

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.