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they contaminating the river and the basin, they’ve almost used up our underground water reserves,” said a young man coming towards us. “Are you journalists?”
    â€œNo, they’re not,” replied the blond man on our behalf.
    â€œHow many years has this been going on?” I asked.
    â€œTwenty years. It started in President Özal’s time,” said the blond man, pointing to a stream which we could smell but couldn’t see. “In the past, there were turtles and frogs in that water. Catfısh as plump as your thigh. Then one day we noticed some of them floating unconscious in the water. We all ran out and started collecting them up like fallen apples. The doctor at the health centre told us not to eat them on any account. Some people did, of course. Later, the water was sent to Ankara for analysis. What was the name of that doctor, Rıfat? You know, the young one.”
    Rıfat didn’t reply.
    â€œSelçuk, wasn’t it?” said someone else.
    â€œHah, Doctor Selçuk. He sent water samples all the way to Ankara for analysis, but when the report came back it stated that the water was clean. The doctor said, ‘This land’s being ruined. Don’t waste your energy for nothing, because everything’s in the hands of the rich nowadays.’ Not a single living creature has survived in that river. They’ve all died. If we irrigate the land with that water, the land dies too.”
    â€œSo what happens if you water the land?”
    â€œIt goes all slimy and mushy.”
    â€œI watered the ground to grow beets, but after six years the land still hasn’t recovered.”
    â€œIt doesn’t produce anything nowadays. In the old days, we’d get over a hundred tons of beet per hectare, but nobody grows beet any more.”
    â€œWe used to have three thousand hectares of beet, but this year, only two out of 200 families grew it on a plot of less than half an acre, just to retain our quota. If we stopped growing it completely, the quota would be lost.”
    â€œHow do you live under these conditions?”
    â€œWe live on thin air, because the water’s certainly no good,” said the blond man in his attractive Thrace accent.
    Everyone at the table laughed.
    â€œBut how do you water your crops?”
    â€œWith rainwater. They only get watered when it rains. We owe everything to Mother Nature.”
    â€œThere’s water lying nine to fifteen metres below ground here that we could use, but the diesel costs for extracting it are so high it’s not economic.”
    â€œAnd that water, which we can’t access, is drawn off by industry. Then, just before dawn, when there’s nobody around to check, they release the dirty water into the stream.”
    â€œThey don’t do any checks anyway. All that stuff about doing it at dawn is a myth. They release dirty water all the time.”
    Fofo and I looked at each other in horror.
    â€œWhy don’t the factories have purification facilities?” I asked.
    This time all the villagers looked at me as if I was either naive or stupid.
    â€œPurification costs money, which is why even the factories that have purification plants don’t use them. After all, it costs nothing to release dirty water into the river,” said the young man who had recently joined the table.
    â€œBut they won’t be able to pollute the water any more,” said a man at a far table. “A commission’s been set up in parliament to draw up an environment law and establish a team of environmental police. They came out here to tell the industrialists how to get purification plants if they didn’t already have them. They can’t still be polluting the river. I don’t believe it.”
    â€œWhy not?” shouted Rıfat, joining in the discussion. “All those laws were introduced in order to enter the EU. It was just for show. Which of those laws actually