Lake Abant lies at 1,328 metres in the Bolu mountains of northwestern Turkey, and one flat road runs the whole way round it: seven kilometres, about two hours if you walk it. That road is the visit. Fir and Scots pine come down to the waterline, and the forest holds its cold through August; that is what brings Istanbul and Ankara up here. Weekends belong to the day-trippers; about half a million people come through the gate each year. The far side of the loop is where they stop coming. You sit in the reeds at the shallow end with nothing louder than water moving through the stems, and the gate all those people come through is out of sight around the shore. Early is the other quiet hour. On a windless morning, before the sun clears the ridge, the surface goes dead flat and you get the whole opposite slope upside down in it, fir by fir. The first breeze breaks it up, and it usually does not come back until evening.
A landslide closed this valley and made the lake in the first place. The lake has bred two things of its own, and one of them no longer manages alone. Its trout cannot hold its numbers unaided, so a hatchery raises the fry and puts them back, year after year, which makes the fish another thing people here keep going. Its crocus, pale blue with a bright yellow throat, opens in the shoreline meadows as the snow pulls back, small enough that you walk straight past it. In January and February the ice creeps out from the bank and in a hard winter closes over; the fir stands white on every slope and the loop becomes a snow walk. For decades the sound of that loop was hooves. Red horse-drawn faytons carried people round the lake, and about two hundred families lived by driving them. The park banned them in 2022 for the horses' sake. The carriages went to a plateau nearby where hardly anyone goes, and electric carts took over that autumn.