Uzungöl is a small lake at 1,090 metres in a spruce valley of Türkiye's eastern Black Sea, and the mountain village in the photographs is mostly thirty years old. The mosque at the waterline, whose twin minarets are doubled on the surface in every picture ever taken here, was built in 2002, after the resort around it. The genuinely old mosques stand away from the water, in the surrounding villages. The lake itself is a stopped stream, the Haldizen pressed between two walls of spruce, and even the landslide every guidebook credits with blocking the valley has never been proved. The ministry's own plan says the slope shows no slip plane, and that the barrier looks like a fan built by a side stream. Other chapters of the same document still call it a landslide lake.
The path around the water tells you the rest. You pass wooden houses first, then the trout ponds, then the stacked hotels, each reflected upside down on the surface, with long stretches of the bank walled in concrete. The trout farms came before the hotels, which were built onto their restaurants, so grilled trout with cornbread and a pan of stringy kuymak is what the valley eats rather than what it sells. From the terraces on the slope above the village you finally see what it is: a stream that stopped, held between two walls of near-black spruce, with the minaret a white pin at the far end. Forest roads climb from the shore to the highland pastures at Şekersu and Demirkapı, where wooden summer houses stand loose in the meadow. More than half the households at the lake still move up in June and come back down in September. Twenty minutes above the hotels the noise stops entirely, and you get the mountain the lake is famous for. The oldest thing in this valley is not in any of the photographs. In the villages around it a few thousand people, most of them over sixty-five, still speak Romeyka, a Greek archaic enough to have kept the ancient infinitive.