Eğirdir

The ridge above the lake probably carried the Pisidian town of Prostanna, and the castle at the neck of the peninsula is traditionally credited to Croesus of Lydia, with additions by Romans, Byzantines and Seljuks. The old Greek name Akroterion, from which Eğirdir derives, is attested from the 15th century: this was a defensible point on the route between plateau and coast, and the walls still enclosing part of the old town belong to a long sequence of rebuilding.

After the Seljuk advance into Anatolia the town grew into a regional centre. The Hamidid emirate made it a capital in the 1300s, and the monuments of the old quarter date from this period of prosperity: the Dündar Bey medrese of 1301, its carved gate reused from a Seljuk caravanserai nearby, and the mosque beside it. Ottoman rule followed, and the town settled into a long quiet life of fishing, orchards and passing traffic.

Its modern shape was set in the 20th century. The Greek Orthodox community that lived on the island of Nis, now Yeşilada, and in the town left in the population exchange of 1923, and their stone houses were taken over by incoming families; the Greek Orthodox church of Aya Stefanos on the island has been restored but stands unused. A causeway later joined the island to the peninsula. Apple growing expanded greatly with irrigation after the middle of the century, walkers came with the St Paul Trail, and falling water levels in dry years have become the town's dominant concern.

Eğirdir lives at the pace of a small, religious, hard-working town. The day is marked by the call to prayer from the mosque in the old quarter, by the opening of the bazaar street, and by boats going out and coming back. Visitors are welcomed without ceremony: pensions are family businesses, often run by the same households for decades, and conversation over tea is the normal way of arranging anything.

Two outside worlds touch it. One is the walking world — the St Paul Trail brought foreign hikers into the mountains and made guiding, lifts to trailheads and simple guest rooms part of the local economy. The other is the lake itself, which shapes identity as much as work: people speak of the water's colour and level the way farmers elsewhere speak of rain, and fishing families have their own customs, nets and boats.

The wider province supplies the region's best-known traditions: rose growing around Isparta, with the dawn harvest each spring, and hand-knotted carpets. Local weddings fill the streets with drums and zurna, and national and religious holidays empty the shops and fill the tea gardens. Alcohol is available but not prominent, and the town is notably quiet after dark.

The town has something over fifteen thousand residents, and the district around it rather more, spread through lakeside villages and orchard hamlets. Numbers rise in summer with visitors from Isparta and Antalya and with families returning from the cities, and fall back in winter, when the shore road is empty and many pensions close.

Apples dominate the economy. Orchards run along the whole eastern shore of the lake, watered from it, and the harvest from September onwards employs pickers, packers and lorry drivers; cold stores and juice and vinegar production have grown alongside. Fishing continues on a smaller scale than it once did, with carp and pike perch the main catches; commercial crayfish harvesting, once worth a large share of the national catch, was banned in 2009 after outbreaks of crayfish plague. Tourism is modest and seasonal, and a military training school has long had a presence in the town.

The lake's level is the recurring anxiety. Irrigation, drought years and a warming climate have lowered it noticeably, exposing shoreline and worrying both growers and fishermen; the balance between watering the orchards and keeping the lake full is argued over constantly. Otherwise daily life is unhurried — school runs, the weekly market, tea by the water, and the mountains closing the view in every direction.

The lake and the orchards set the menu. Fish from Eğirdir — carp, pike-perch and smaller species — is fried or grilled simply and served with salad. Freshwater crayfish were long a speciality of the lake and were sold well beyond the district, though disease and overfishing ended the commercial harvest. Fish restaurants cluster on Yeşilada, where tables are set almost on the water and the cooking stays plain.

Away from the shore the food is that of the Anatolian plateau. Lokantas serve bean stews, stuffed vegetables, bulgur pilaf and yoghurt-based soups; pide and lahmacun come out of wood-fired ovens; and gözleme, thin pastry folded over cheese, potato or wild greens, is cooked on griddles at markets and roadside stops. Mountain honey, walnuts and mulberries turn up on breakfast tables along with village butter and thick cream.

Apples are the town's export and its emblem, eaten fresh, pressed into juice, boiled into a thick molasses or made into vinegar. From nearby Isparta come the rose products that scent the whole province: rose jam, rose-flavoured lokum and rosewater used in sweets. Tea is drunk all day, coffee after meals, and ayran, a salted yoghurt drink, accompanies grilled food.