At Eğirdir the town walks out into its own lake. First a narrow peninsula, then a causeway laid on low fill with open water on both sides and fishing rods propped along its edge. At the end stands Yeşilada, an island of stone and timber houses out in the open. This is the second-largest freshwater lake in Türkiye, in the Taurus of the southwest. It is oddly shallow for its size, so wind and light rework the surface all day. Walking out, the island grows slowly larger ahead of you. The town shrinks against the mountains behind. On the far side wooden jetties run into the water, and at last light the whole lake goes flat and orange around you.
On the mainland the main street carries the carved stone gateway of a caravanserai built in 1237, gutted by fire and rebuilt as a college around 1301. Ibn Battuta came through in 1332 and remembered the bazaars, the running streams and the fruit orchards. Those orchards are still what pays the district's bills, and from September ladders stand in the apple trees and crates stack at the gates along the lake road. From December the open water carries dense rafts of coot, pochard and tufted duck. The town fixed its own name along the way: for most of the last century it was spelled Eğridir, which in Turkish reads as "it is crooked", and in 1985 the letters were rearranged. The standard plate on those jetty terraces is fried pike-perch, and it is worth knowing what you are eating. The fish was put into the lake to raise the catch, and it worked its way through what was already here until the lake's own endemic fish were gone. The water has form for this kind of loss: in the 1970s this one lake supplied roughly a third of Europe's crayfish, until a fungal plague swept it in the mid-1980s and the fishery never came back. It arrives with bread and salad while the boats that caught it are tied up a few metres from you.