An Elegy for the Death of Hamun

Sistan and Baluchestan, in southeastern Iran, borders Afghanistan and Pakistan. Sistan is home to one of Iran’s oldest civilizations and was long one of the country’s main farming regions. Its life depended on Lake Hamun, fed by the Helmand River, which flows down from Afghanistan. The lake’s reeds fed the livestock and were used to build traditional boats called tutan, and people lived from fishing, farming and herding. Today, after years of drought, and with dams on the Helmand in Afghanistan holding back the water, the lake has turned into cracked, barren ground, and most of its wildlife and plants are gone. Boats lie broken and overturned. Faced with unemployment and despair, many people have left, either for the port of Chabahar in the south or for the farms of Golestan province in the northeast, where a better life rarely awaits them. Sistan has become a land of forgotten people, whose voices have gone unheard for so long that they have fallen silent.