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 canal, so that marble, timber and the produce of the fields could be easily carried by boat… The emperor’s reply was cautious: if the lake were joined to the sea, what if its waters drained away? The lake in question is the calm water we now call Lake Sapanca. Pliny’s letters are still read today; the lines of a Roman governor explaining lakes, canals, costs and laborers to an emperor sound surprisingly familiar even two thousand years later. As if, though the language of letters may change, their essence never has…