Only one fish can live in Lake Van, and it has to leave the lake to breed. This is the largest soda lake on Earth, in eastern Türkiye at 1,640 metres, with the volcanoes Süphan and Nemrut on either side. Nothing flows out, so whatever comes in stays and concentrates. The result is water that feels wrong in a good way: soft, slippery, faintly soapy, because the soda lathers with the oils on your skin. It holds less salt than the sea, so it will not float you any better, and only July and August are warm enough to swim. On the bed stand carbonate towers, the largest microbialites ever found, some of them forty metres high and still growing.
Akdamar is twenty minutes out from the Gevaş jetty, and the boats go when they fill. The Church of the Holy Cross has stood there since the tenth century, and the carving covering its pink-red tufa runs the whole way round, so you read it panel by panel. Almond trees flower white across the island from late March. One day each September the liturgy is sung inside and every boat is full; any other morning you have the wall to yourself. Come back early and the water is flat before the day's wind gets up, with Süphan lying upside down on it and the church's red stone doubled in the shallows. Breakfast in the city is the other institution: otlu peynir, the herbed cheese, kavut and murtuğa, honey under clotted cream, and enough small plates to fill the table. The cats here swim. The Van cat comes from this basin, chalk white and often with one blue eye and one amber, and it will get into water almost nothing lives in. In May and June the one animal that does leaves it. Pearl mullet crowd the stream mouths and throw themselves at the Muradiye rapids, over and over, because their eggs cannot survive the soda, and the gulls know the dates and line the banks. Every fish in this lake was hatched in a river.