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We are three buses, a convoy of brand-new comfort-wagons from the Zafer factory in Malatya. With our police escort we are bowling across the hot and beautiful plains of South-eastern Turkey. We are air-conditioned, watered, tead-and-coffeed by our steward. When we stop for lunch, a banquet appears beneath the mulberry trees, or beneath a Bedu canopy or in the open-sided vaults of a seventeenth-century medresse. We prop ourselves on bolsters, scoop up pilav and tahin, tear lavash bread and watch troupes of Kurdish musicians in multi-coloured cummerbunds and shalwar trousers play their skirls and riffs for us.

Bus no 1 is English and American, Swiss, Dutch, Lebanese and French. Buses 2 and 3 are filled with a roll-call of Istanbul's haute monde. They come from shipping families, banking families. They are the wives and ex-wives of property magnates and politicos. They have brought glittering costumes for the evening, sensible shoes for days of sight-seeing. One of them has brought her Moldovan masseuse. And between them they have brought too their largesse - gifts of dollars to spread among schools and community groups to keep the young Kurds from the clutches of the PKK and the Islamists. They are all as agog as we are to see a region which has been cut off for years by the Kurdish war, and for even longer by prejudice and poverty.

Between the Tigris and the Euphrates lies one of the oldest inhabited, most richly-layered places on earth. To the Arabs it is al-Jazirah, the "island", to others it is the Fertile Crescent. To the Kurds it is northern Kurdistan, to the Turks south-eastern Turkey. It has always been something of a solar plexus in the nerve system of world civilisations; its ruins and its walled towns testamant to the myriad peoples who have passed through here, who have ruled and settled. It has also - surprise, surprise - been a perennial battlefield.

The most recent conflict came to an end in 1998 when - after fifteen years and more than 30,000 lives lost - Ocalan, the captured PKK leader, persuaded his supporters to give up their arms. The Turkish government has now pushed to the fore its own on-going civil solution to the region's spikiness: a series of twenty-two dams designed to enrich the area with irrigation and hydro-electric power.

The scheme is not without its critics. In fact, few but politicians (including our own Mr Blair) and possible contractors (our own Balfour Beatty) see the benefits of emptying dozens more villages, displacing thousands, flooding still unexcavated and very important archaeological sites and, perhaps most alarming of all, antagonising the Syrians and Iraqis downstream. Yet the outsized scheme, fuelled by the twin impulses of greed and pacification, is simply a contemporary version of the same old territorial struggles, the same old urge to control the region.

Several people - advocates and detractors alike - said rather oddly that in a hundred years time the dams will be obsolete, their machinery exhausted. And then what? In centuries to come, will the ruined pipelines and weed-grown barrages be visited as the citadels, tombs and churches - or the haunting mountain-top figures on Nemrut Dag - are today?

Come here while you can. Come here now while there is no fighting, and before all the dams have been completed. Come to Hasankeyf for instance, a cave-carved city on the banks of the Tigris river. Briefly it was the capital of the 12th century Artuklu kingdom, though for much longer its importance derived from its place as a crossing-point on the Silk Road. It is a haunting, evocative place. The Tigris describes a perfect arc beneath three-hundred-foot cliffs. Its blue-grey waters ruck up against the piles of the ruined Roman bridge. Herds of angora goats cluster on the banks, while in the shallows summer crowds of villagers cool themselves, scrub their cars or sit at fruit-filled tables ankle-deep in the water. From the town itself, rises the impeccably-proportioned minaret of El-Rizk mosque. Look carefully at all this. If the Ilisu dam is built, only the top ten feet of the minaret will remain above water.

The larger towns of the region are safer, built as they are on high ground. Mardin is astonishing, with its parchment-yellow stone and its steep terraced slopes and its aspect - looking south over a patchwork plain which stretches forever into the haze. Further east is Diyarbakir, a sultry place, where groups of Kurds lurk on the street corners and the black basalt of the walls and the cobbles fill the alleys with its funereal tones.

Urfa is the city to spend most time in. There we fell in with an enthusiast named Mahmut. Earlier he had reduced the passengers of Bus no 1 to uncontrollable laughter with his mimicry - his Cockney, his Geordie and his Scouse.

"I was studying [stood-yin] in Britain," he plucked Brummie from his reportoire to tell us. "Then I spent time in Bodrum with the seaside tourists [say-side tao-wrists], but my heart [me-art] is here in Urfa [oo-rfah]." And he clapped a hand to his chest to prove it.

That afternoon he took me on a tour of the city's backstreets. With me came Ruya, a neat and elegant scion of the Ottoman royal line, "I will never come here again," she said, "so I want to see the minorities."

The minorities, it has to be said, were thinner on the ground than their buildings. Three hours of ferreting uncovered Jewish hans, Assyrian, Syriac, Armenian and Byzantine churches - yet only a handful of the various peoples themselves. But we marvelled at their stone legacy: the lintel carvings, the exuberant detailing and at the mosques and medresses and the bazaars. We pushed at doors in high walls to find courtyards of ruined opulence. We were amazed at the old town's extent, at the ferment of faiths between its stones, and at its neglect. Urfa is the place where Abraham was born. Like Jerusalem it is sacred to the three religions he spawned, a reminder of their common ancestry. Great plans are afoot for it, explained Mahmut sadly. "The World Bank has singled out Urfa as a symbol of peace. They have granted $50million dollars for a centre - like a Disney centre, outside the city for the three religions. Why can they not restore this, the old town, instead?"

The next morning our three buses swayed boat-like along a minor road to a village called Kisas. Here, the Turkish press had assembled to meet the buses. For several days they had been trailing a member of Bus no 1 who bore a striking resemblance to the republic's Minister of the Economy. We played along with it but they rumbled him in the end. (The minister was in fact due to join the trip until he discovered his ex-wife was in Bus no 2). The press turned their attention to the saintly Ali McGraw instead.

Another day, another spread of a lunch. Kisas was an Alawite village and in it was a a Cem evi, a community house, of Sufis and they were going to perform for us. Tents had been erected around a makeshift stge. The ladies of Buses 2 and 3 slipped off their shoes and sat like a seraglio beneath the canvas. Five dancers emerged and performed a hypnotic dance, reminiscent of Mevlana's whirlers in Konya. But the people of Kisas were followers of another Sufi, of Bektash. His teachings were egalitarian. "Bektash was a teacher for the people," I heard Ruya explain to her friend Cigem. "Mevlana was a palace dervish. He was always our dervish, darling."

Wherever we went that week, we saw signs of a region re-emerging from decades of isolation. While the twentieth century saw Ataturk's Turkish republic achieve a measure of prosperity - unstable though it has proved - the wild south-east languished, underfunded. Little wonder that the PKK with its Marxist creed found followers. But now the government's ministers are doing all they can to drag the area into the secular, Eurocentric world they plan for Turkey.

The task has not been an easy one. A couple of years ago, in the first flush of the ceasefire, they sent the Ankara Philharmonic Orchestra to Diyarbakir, a hotbed of Kurdish separatism. An hour before the performance, the auditorium remained defiantly empty. Officials went out into the street and gathered up everyone they could find. Afterwards the country's state-backed press thronged the exit. "What did you think of the concert?" they asked one old Kurd.

He eyed them suspiciously. "Our people have suffered for many years," he said. "But we were never tortured like this."

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