About two-thirds of the salt Türkiye eats comes out of Lake Tuz, and it gets out by the lake disappearing. This is the country's second-largest lake, on the central Anatolian plateau, and nothing drains out of it. Spring runoff spreads a few centimetres of water over the salt, shallow enough to walk in without wetting your knees. Then the summer sun takes it back. What it leaves is brine about a third salt by weight, nearly ten times the sea. By August that has set into a white crust roughly thirty centimetres thick, hard enough to carry a truck, and you can walk out on it for kilometres. It crunches like packed snow and holds the day's heat in the soles of your shoes. From July the works move onto the pans and lift the summer's crop, scraping the crystallised floor into hills of raw salt: coarse grey-white grains bound for tables across the country.
The last water to go turns red. As the brine shrinks, the microbes living in it load themselves with pigment against the salt and the glare, so the final pools flush pink and then deep rust. It is not a trick of the light but the water's own colour, and the first autumn rains drain it away. The same pigment reaches the birds. Greater flamingos filter those algae and the invertebrates grazing on them, so the colour settles into their feathers: they hatch grey and eat their way pink over several years. They nest out in the middle, on islands the water keeps safe, in colonies of five or six thousand nests — the species' most important breeding ground in Türkiye. From June the shallows fill with grey, gangling chicks working out how to feed, and standing on the shore you hear the colony before you see it. Under all of it the salt is being put to a second use. More than a kilometre down, fresh water piped from a dam is pumped into ancient salt beds to melt out caverns, and the hollows are filled with natural gas.