Lakes of Turkey
Lakes: 39 places from 29 provinces of Turkey. Each has a model-like miniature, a short story and a Numa Made ring on the Isometric Turkey map.
Lake Büyükçekmece
Why would a sultan build a bridge he would never see finished? When Suleiman the Magnificent decided to have Mimar Sinan build a bridge across the marshy flats where Lake Büyükçekmece meets…
See on the map →Lake İznik
Can there be a church at the bottom of a lake? In 2014, those photographing the shore of Lake İznik from the air probably didn’t believe their eyes when they first noticed the silhouette of…
See on the map →Gölyazı
In the old days, the word “yazı” meant not only writing, as it does today, but also flatland, plain, open country. So what would the yazı of a göl, a lake, look like? When you reach…
See on the map →Lake Sapanca
About nineteen hundred years ago, Pliny the Younger, governor of Bithynia, wrote a letter to the Emperor Trajan. In it he proposed linking the great lake near Nicomedia to the sea by a…
See on the map →Bird Paradise & Lake Manyas
In Farid ud-Din Attar’s ‘The Conference of the Birds’, the birds set out on a long and arduous journey to find their king, the Simurgh. Of the thousands of birds who cross the seven…
See on the map →Lake Köyceğiz
Do trees weep? Look at the forests on the shores of Lake Köyceğiz and saying “yes” isn’t hard at all… For here live the sweetgum trees that grow almost nowhere but southwestern Anatolia…
See on the map →Lake Bafa & Herakleia
“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.” With this line, the English poet John Keats opens his long poem ‘Endymion’. So who was Endymion, and what did he have to do with eternity? Come, let’s…
See on the map →Lake Marmara & Bintepeler
In the second book of the ‘Republic’, Plato tells the story of a Lydian shepherd. After a storm and an earthquake split the ground open, the shepherd climbs down into the earth and finds a…
See on the map →Lake Eğirdir
In ‘Romeo and Juliet’, Shakespeare writes: “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet.” So would changing a single letter in a town’s name change…
See on the map →Lake Kovada
Some lakes show themselves at once; the moment you reach the shore, they greet you in all their blue. Kovada, though, appears slowly out of the forest, from among the trees, like a shy…
See on the map →Lake Salda
Of the Earth, shrunk to a pale blue dot in a photograph taken from deep space, Carl Sagan said: “Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.” So to understand another…
See on the map →Lake Burdur
Picture a duck that swims holding its tail bolt upright, like a flagpole… That is where its Turkish name comes from: dikkuyruk, the “stiff-tail”. One of the most important places where this…
See on the map →Menzelet Dam
Can a river fall in love? The ancient name of the Ceyhan is Pyramos, and that name recalls a love story. Pyramus and Thisbe, whose tale Ovid tells in the ‘Metamorphoses’, are two young…
See on the map →Lakes Eymir & Mogan
“Ankara has no sea,” people like to tease those from the capital. Ankarans pay the jibe little mind; for south of the city, in the middle of the steppe, they have two lakes of their own…
See on the map →Lake Beyşehir & Kubadabad
With his whole realm before him, where does a sultan build his summer palace? By the sea, in the mountains, or on the shore of a great lake that suddenly appears in the middle of the…
See on the map →Lake Gökpınar
In Turkish, the word “gök” means both the sky and the clearest shade of blue. But can a lake do more than reflect the sky, and make the sky’s color its own? When those who named this lake…
See on the map →Lake Seyfe
A pink-winged bird in the middle of the steppe… Sounds like a dream, doesn’t it? Yet at Lake Seyfe, near Mucur in Kırşehir, this dream comes true every spring. So what could flamingos…
See on the map →Hirfanlı Dam
Has a war in history ever been stopped by the sun? According to Herodotus, it has… The Lydians and the Medes had been at war for six years; one day, right in the middle of battle, day…
See on the map →Kapulukaya Dam
On the steppe, water is greeted like a miracle. Those who see for the first time that wide blue expanse appearing suddenly among the yellow hills south of Kırıkkale can hardly believe their…
See on the map →Lake Abant
“A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature,” writes Henry David Thoreau in his…
See on the map →Yedigöller
“Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower,” says Albert Camus. Anyone who wants to put these words to the test should head for Yedigöller in October; for there the beeches…
See on the map →Lake Efteni
For a migrating bird, what is the most precious place on the journey: the destination, or a shore along the way to catch its breath? On a journey of thousands of kilometers, a single stop…
See on the map →Lake Ladik & Akdağ
Picture a town set on the shore of a lake, at the foot of a mountain; snow in winter, birds in summer, the bounty of the plain in spring… Ladik is one of the rare places that offers all of…
See on the map →Lake Borabay
A lake hidden in a forest shows itself only to those who seek it. Lake Borabay, appearing suddenly among the dense trees in the high forests of Taşova, is just like that; as if it does not…
See on the map →Uzungöl
How is a lake born? Some in basins carved by glaciers, some in the mouths of extinct volcanoes, some in hollows where the earth has cracked and sunk… Uzungöl has an altogether different…
See on the map →Lake Sera
What comes to mind first when you hear Akçaabat? Köfte, its famous meatballs, of course… There’s no point denying it; but did you know that just above the hometown of köfte, in a narrow…
See on the map →Şavşat Karagöl & Sahara
What comes to mind when you hear “Sahara”? Sand dunes, a scorching sun, camels plodding slowly toward the horizon… So what if we told you that one of the greenest corners of the Black Sea…
See on the map →Borçka Karagöl
Anyone who sets out to count how many Karagöls there are in Turkey will have a hard time of it. On the Black Sea, in the Aegean, in the East… Many a lake with dark waters and wooded shores…
See on the map →Tortum Lake & Waterfall
Can destruction be the beginning of beauty? Stand on the shore of Lake Tortum and the answer shines in the green of its water; for this lake was born neither of the rain’s patience nor a…
See on the map →Floating Islands
Can an island change its address? Look at a map and islands are fixed points in the middle of a sea or a lake that never budge; they are given a name, and their location is described in…
See on the map →Lake Hazar
Genesis, in the Torah, tells of a river that went out of Eden and parted into four heads: “the name of the third river is Hiddekel… And the fourth river is Euphrates.” Hiddekel is the river…
See on the map →Keban Dam
If a river stops flowing, is it still a river? Or, the moment it stops, does it change its name, its temper, its voice, and become something else entirely? That is just what befalls the…
See on the map →Atatürk Dam & Kahta
The birthplace of the man who wrote one of the first stories of a journey to the Moon now sleeps at the bottom of a lake… In his work known as ‘A True Story’, the second-century satirist…
See on the map →Lake Balık
For things that will never happen, we say “when the fish climbs the poplar.” Yet in the mountains of Ağrı, the fish has climbed not a poplar but all the way to 2,250 meters… And how modest…
See on the map →Lake Çıldır
Galloping horses across a lake? It may sound like a fairy tale at first, but on Lake Çıldır, once winter comes, it is just an ordinary day. The lake is sealed under thick ice; horses pull…
See on the map →Akdamar Island
“Ah Tamar…” The name of the island in the middle of Lake Van is said to come from the last words of a drowning young man. Legend has it that Tamara, who lived on the island, lit a lamp…
See on the map →Çarpanak Island
“The gull sees farthest who flies highest.” Readers of Richard Bach’s ‘Jonathan Livingston Seagull’ don’t easily forget this line. So what happens when gulls settle not by the sea but on a…
See on the map →Tatvan
How does a train board a lake? It may sound like a riddle, but in Tatvan the answer is simple: by rolling, car by car, into the ferry moored at the pier… This port town at the western tip…
See on the map →Hamurpet Lakes
“The eye is the mirror of the heart,” they say. So if mountains had eyes too, what would they reflect? Looking at the small lakes hidden among volcanic hills in the highlands of Varto, more…
See on the map →
Provinces with this kind of place
- Adıyaman1 place
- Ağrı1 place
- Amasya1 place
- Ankara1 place
- Ardahan1 place
- Artvin2 places
- Balıkesir1 place
- Bingöl1 place
- Bitlis1 place
- Bolu2 places
- Burdur2 places
- Bursa2 places
- Düzce1 place
- Elazığ2 places
- Erzurum1 place
- Isparta2 places
- Istanbul1 place
- Kahramanmaraş1 place
- Kırıkkale1 place
- Kırşehir2 places
- Konya1 place
- Manisa1 place
- Muğla2 places
- Muş1 place
- Sakarya1 place
- Samsun1 place
- Sivas1 place
- Trabzon2 places
- Van2 places