Karagöl is a small forest lake held in place by a landslide, though almost every page and signboard that points to it calls it a crater lake. The mistake is easy to make: Yamanlar, the mountain that holds it, really is built of old volcanic rock, so a round pool of dark water near the top looks exactly like a flooded vent. Surveys found a different explanation. A landslide came to rest against a fault scarp and dammed the hollow, ponding the water where it lies today, some 810 metres above the Aegean and 35 kilometres from the middle of İzmir. Barely three and a half hectares, it is small enough to circle on foot in twenty minutes. Willows and plane trees lean out over the water, red and black pines crowd the slopes behind them, and the reflected forest turns the surface so dark that the lake took its name from it: kara göl, the black lake.
That black water carries İzmir's oldest story. Local tradition calls it the Lake of Tantalus — the king who ate at the table of the gods, gave away their secrets, and was condemned to stand forever in water that drained away whenever he stooped to drink. Greek writers set that punishment on Mount Sipylus to the east, which the ancients seem to have counted as one range with Yamanlar. His tomb was real: a conical mound on the slopes above old Smyrna, drawn by the traveller Charles Texier in 1835. It is gone now, flattened as the city climbed the hill, its burial chamber left under apartment blocks. The lake outlasted the monument. Today Karagöl is a nature park, and İzmir comes up to use it — picnic tables under the pines, cold spring water at the fountains, ducks working the shallows, resin in the warm air.