Lake Tuz

The first thing is the glare. In summer the surface here is white, flat and enormous, and the light comes at you twice — once from the sky and once bounced back off the ground. Step out and the crust breaks under your shoe with a dry crack, like walking on thin ice that has no water beneath it. The air is hot and completely dry. Lick your lip after a few minutes and you will taste salt that arrived on the wind.

Look at the horizon and try to find where the land ends. On a still day you often cannot. The plain, the crust and the sky run together in a pale band with no clear edge. This is the second largest lake in Turkey by area, sitting in a shallow basin in the middle of the Anatolian plateau. Its size is genuine. Its depth is not. For much of the year you could wade a long way out and stay below your knees.

That shallowness explains everything else here. In spring, meltwater and rain spread a thin sheet of water across the basin. Through summer the sun removes it. The water retreats kilometres from where it stood in April, and what it leaves behind is salt — a hard white crust that thickens as the season goes on. By late summer trucks and machinery can drive out onto the surface. By winter, water returns and the process starts again.

The salt has nowhere to go, and that is the key. Streams flow into this basin, but nothing flows out of it. Every river arriving here carries dissolved minerals picked up from the rocks upstream. The water evaporates. The minerals stay. Repeat that for thousands of years in a hot, dry basin with no outlet and you get water saltier than the sea. Nothing that you would recognise as a fish can live in it.

This is one of the main sources of table salt in Turkey. Production is straightforward in principle. Shallow pans are flooded, the sun does the work, and the crust is scraped up, washed, refined and packed. Look for low white ridges out on the flats — those are harvested piles waiting to be collected. There is a fair chance the salt on your restaurant table anywhere in this country began as water lying in this basin.

Now the part people do not expect. This dead-looking place is one of the most important flamingo breeding sites in the whole Mediterranean region. Thousands of pairs nest here in summer, on mud islands out in the shallows where no predator can easily walk. They build low cone-shaped nests of mud. The chicks hatch grey and gather into large creches. Through binoculars, the far edge of the water turns into a moving pink and white line.

Flamingos are here for a reason. Hypersaline water suits tiny brine-adapted organisms — brine shrimp and salt-tolerant algae — which nothing else competes for. Flamingos filter that soup through their bent bills. The pigment in those organisms is what colours the birds. A flamingo is not born pink. It eats its way to pink over time. The same pigment, produced by algae in vast numbers, can also turn stretches of the lake itself a soft rose colour on hot days.

If you come after rain, the experience changes completely. A film of water a centimetre or two deep turns the whole basin into a mirror. The sky lands on the ground. People walking out on the flats appear to be standing on cloud, and the horizon line disappears. Photographers know about this and plan for it. Bring something you do not mind getting wet, because the water is brine and it will leave a white crust on everything.

Look around at the land beyond the basin. This is the Central Anatolian steppe — flat, treeless, and farmed in huge low-relief fields of wheat and sugar beet. Villages appear as clusters of low buildings with a single minaret. Shepherds move flocks along the roadsides. In winter this plateau gets genuinely cold, with snow lying over the same ground that will be a salt desert by August. Few landscapes swing so far between two extremes.

The lake is under pressure, and that is worth knowing while you stand here. Groundwater is pumped heavily for irrigation across the surrounding plain, and the streams feeding the basin are drawn on as well. In some recent years the water has dried back earlier than usual, before flamingo chicks were ready. Conservation status protects the area on paper. What actually decides the lake's future is how much water the farms around it take.

Practical matters, because this place punishes carelessness. There is no shade at all. The crust looks solid but hides soft brine mud in places, so stay near the marked access areas and do not drive out onto it. Salt corrodes vehicles and ruins leather. Sunglasses are not optional, since the reflected glare is hard on the eyes. Rinse your shoes afterwards, or the white line at the sole will stay with you for months.

Before you leave, walk out a little way, stop, and stay still without speaking. There is often no sound at all here — no traffic, no birds nearby, no leaves, because there are no trees. Just the ringing quiet of a very large flat space. Crouch down and look closely at the crust. It is made of small clear crystals with straight edges, each one built by water leaving. Then stand up, turn around, and go back toward the road.