The Politics of Sacrifice and Nature Restoration in the Çoruh Valley This paper provides a critical ethnographic examination of the politics of environmental sacrifice and restoration in a town submerged under Turkey’s tallest dam, the Yusufeli Dam, built on the Çoruh River. While existing research on sacrifice zones sheds light on environmental justice struggles against racialized, gendered, and class-based power structures that render certain places as sacrificial, less attention has been given to the experiences of historically marginalized communities perpetuating sacrificial narratives about the environment. In the Çoruh Basin, valley residents employ and mobilize the trope of self-sacrifice in their lived experience of submergence under dam waters. Within this context, state officials and engineers claim to compensate for the sacrifice through nature restoration projects. This paper focuses on one such environmental effort: the salvage of fertile soils and local fruit trees from the valley and their relocation to the resettlement site. Drawing on insights from the anthropology of ruination and the political ecology of restoration and repair, I will show that rather than compensating for and mitigating environmental sacrifice, state-led nature restoration projects is bound up with the process of ruination that is rendered inevitable.