Lake Abant is a lake ringed by fir at 1,328 metres in the mountains of Bolu province, in northwestern Türkiye, two and a half hours from Istanbul, circled on a flat shore road of seven kilometres with the forest coming down to the water, and it holds a trout and a crocus found nowhere else, the trout restocked by hand and the crocus pushing up pale blue in the shoreline meadows as the snow pulls back. The lake was made when a landslide dammed the valley, not by gravity alone but by the shaking of the North Anatolian fault, which runs beneath the mountains and is still working, and it is shallow, warm enough to swim in summer and frozen from the bank inward in January and February, closing across completely in a hard winter while the fir stands white on every slope around it; the shore road runs the whole way round in about two hours at a walking pace, with the fir on the left and the hotels and picnic meadows on the right, and on a windless morning before the sun clears the ridge the fir slope stands in the water doubled. For decades the red faytons, the horse carriages, were the sound of Abant, with some 200 families from the villages driving them around the lake, until the carriages were banned in 2021 for the sake of the horses.
The Abant trout, a species of the lake alone, no longer holds on unaided and is bred and released by the fisheries, and the Abant crocus, pale blue with a bright yellow throat, opens in the meadows at the water's edge in early spring, the lake's own flower; from the last week of October into the first days of November the oriental beech and hornbeam turn copper and gold against the evergreen fir, the lake's busiest weeks with the cars from Istanbul and Ankara. Abant is a lake a fault made, and its trout and its crocus belong to it alone.