YANNIS Mitsis is an unlikely water diviner. A 65-year-old shoemaker and farmer, he lives in a small village in the centre of Cyprus, an arid Mediterranean island where most rivers are dry for six months of the year. But he is probably the last man left on the island who knows how to summon water from the depths of the hillside summer and winter, using nothing more than a pickaxe and gravity.
Mitsis is one of a decreasing band of people worldwide who are skilled in a secret craft that has sustained farming in dry lands for thousands of years. From China to Iran, Algeria to Armenia, and even in Peru and Chile, tunnel builders have succeeded in a task few modern water engineers would ever attempt. They dig gently sloping tunnels for many kilometres underground in order to tap hidden water and channel it to fields at the surface. They are, in effect, creating underground rivers. In Cyprus, these rivers are called 鈥渓aoumia鈥� in Greek, or qanats, a word used throughout the Mediterranean and Middle East which comes from ancient Persian, like the art of underground river building itself.
Mitsis learnt the craft from his father. How to dig the mother well at the head of the intended tunnel route to establish the depth of the water table. How to dig the tunnel itself, starting from the exit point for the water and heading at a steady incline towards the mother well, moulding its route to the contours.
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Every 30 metres or so, Mitsis explains, they would connect the tunnel to the surface with a vertical shaft. This would provide ventilation, access to remove excavated soil and for later maintenance, as well as helping guide the route of the tunnel. It took five people 15 days to dig a single shaft and tunnel section, he says 鈥� seven years for a 5-kilometre tunnel.
Because the construction of laoumia, or qanats, has usually been in the hands of peasant farmers, there are few written records. There seems to be no descriptions in English of the laoumia of Cyprus 鈥� even though the country was for many decades run by the British. And there are only brief notes in Greek in government archives in Nicosia. New 杏吧原创 heard about them from a young Nicosia student, Efthymia Alphas, who studied them for a school project.
Qanats were first dug in ancient Persia about 5000 years ago. There, most rain falls high on the mountains, disappearing into huge fans of sand and gravel the lower slopes. The Persians tapped this water by chasing small springs back into the hillside to increase their flow.
There are an estimated 40 000 qanats in Iran. End to end, they would reach two-thirds of the way to the Moon 鈥� a vast engineering endeavour that dwarfs construction of the Egyptian pyramids or the Great Wall of China. The longest qanats run for more than 40 kilometres. One giant tunnel near Gonabad in eastern Iran has a mother well more than 300 metres deep. And qanats may still supply up to half of the Iran鈥檚 water, according to Henri Goblot, a French water engineer.
Qanat technology spread with the conquering Persians between 500 BC and AD 600. Today there are qanats in use in southern Afghanistan, Pakistan, western China, Cyprus, Egypt, Yemen, Oman and the Kurdish lands of Iraq. Arabs took the skill to Morocco, Algeria and Spain, where they once watered Moorish Madrid.
Spaniards took qanats to the New World. In the northern coastal desert of Peru, the Chimu empire used them to bring water from the rivers of the Andes. Qanats even irrigate paddy fields in Japan, where they are called mambos. Shoko Okazaki, from the Persian department of the Osaka University of Foreign Studies, believes the technology reached Japan from Persia via China and Korea.
Today, in the Algerian Sahara, qanats (known locally as foggara) are 鈥渢he mainstay of peasant agriculture鈥�, according to Jean Bisson of the University of Tours. In Oman, according to Roderic Dutton at the University of Durham, aflaj 鈥渋rrigate 55 per cent of the cropped land鈥�.
Classic qanats are dug in soft deposits. But the system has been adapted to tap hard rocks, such as limestone. Zvi Ron, a geographer at the University of Tel Aviv, has catalogued hundreds of tunnel networks in the hills of the Holy Land. They watered orange groves for 2000 years until being abandoned during the Palestinian exodus in 1948 and 1967. Similar hollowed out galleries harness most of the underground water in the hills of Malta.
Qanat systems worldwide show many signs of their common ancestry. Almost all are privately owned by groups of landowners, with water shared out on a rota system. They were usually dug and maintained by separate castes of well-diggers, known in Iran as mughani. All except those in hard rocks have vertical shafts to the surface every 30 to 50 metres. To enable the tunnel diggers head in the right direction, lights are hung in the intermediate shafts. Lining them up ensures that they can dig straight towards the mother well. Repairs are conducted using a wooden tripod erected above the well to lower the diggers and their tools.
German hydrologist Gunther Garbrecht, in a study for UNESCO, wrote that qanats 鈥渉ave been so successful because they are self-regulating. They tap the groundwater potential only up to and never beyond the limits of natural replenishment, and do not unbalance the hydrological and ecological equilibrium of the region.鈥�
The great advantage of qanats over pumped boreholes and many rivers is that they yield water all year round without pumping. But they are immensely laborious to build and the water will flow whether it is needed or not 鈥� though in theory tunnels could be fitted with water-tight gates. A study in 1945 of one dig near Marrakesh found it took 6000 person-days to dig a tunnel to irrigate 15 hectares, which would be enough to feed 10 families.
Tunnel digging in small Cypriot villages was financed by consortiums of farmers. Mitsis remembers that his masters then were Turkish landowners, who regarded access to water as being as important as land. 鈥淲ater is power here,鈥� he says.
Nowadays some of the irrigation water for his village of Peristerona comes from pumped wells. But until recently the only summer supply came from his tunnels. 鈥淭here are five laoumia supplying Peristerona village,鈥� says Mitsis. 鈥淎s a boy in the 1940s, I helped dig them all. This is a village of milk and honey. We have never suffered from drought here.鈥�
Recently he repaired an entire section beneath a field of cactuses and fig trees after a tunnel collapsed. And every year, the committee that owns the tunnel sends him down the shafts to make running repairs.
His father died when a rope broke while he was repairing a well. Nonetheless, Mitsis, who dug his last new laoumi in 1954, still works alone, lowering himself as much as 60 metres to the tunnel from a portable wooden tripod above the shaft. At one point, a laoumi he helped extend in the 1940s passes a few metres beneath the riverbed. Was he ever worried working beneath water? He insists not.
At the nearby village of Ergates, a tunnel 1.5 kilometres long yields 50 cubic metres of water an hour. An old villager remembers: 鈥淭he laoumi was last extended in 1920, and 85 people worked on it.鈥� Extension of tunnels was frequent during drought.
But many tunnels are no longer repaired, their shafts are capped in concrete and they are abandoned when their flow fails. Nonetheless, there could be a revival. Some governments are seeing the maintenance of existing systems as an alternative to modern dams and even pumped wells. In the western Chinese province of Xinjiang, more than a thousand ancient qanats are being renovated to irrigate the Turfan basin. In Oman, the government has paid for extensive repairs of 6000 aflaj. And the Iranian government has attempted to revive what it regards as an Islamic craft.
Some water engineers believe the digging can be mechanised to provide new, cheap and permanent sources of water. Last year the Albanian government revealed plans to bore a tunnel for 5 kilometres into limestone rocks northeast of Tirana to enlarge the flow of the 鈥渟pring of Gura-Bardha鈥�. It should yield up to 4 cubic metres a second for hydroelectric power and irrigation.
And having seen ancient qanats in cliffs south of the Dead Sea, Arie Issar, professor of hydrology at Israel鈥檚 Ben Gurion University of the Negev, wants to develop mechanised qanat-digging to exploit water beneath the Negev desert that is uneconomic to capture with modern pumps.
But back in Cyprus, Mitsis folds up his tripod and goes back to his shoemaking. 鈥淭here is nobody to take my place,鈥� he says. His son is a criminal lawyer in London. 鈥淲hen I stop work, there will be nobody left to repair the tunnels.鈥�