Lake Eğirdir is the second-largest freshwater lake in Türkiye, in Isparta province in the lake district of the southwest, shallow and changing colour through the day from grey to turquoise under the mountains, with a town that walks out along a causeway onto an island in open water, and it is visited for fried fish on the island's terraces, apples from the orchards on the shore and a hill above the town with a ruined city on its slope. The town of Eğirdir stands on a peninsula with a Seljuk caravanserai of 1237 whose carved gateway serves a school, and the road runs on from it along a low causeway with open water on both sides and fishing rods propped along its edge to Yeşilada, the green island, a village of guesthouses and wooden terraces over the water; the standard plate there is pike-perch, the introduced predator that emptied the lake of its own endemic fish in the 1950s, and in the 1970s this one lake supplied a third of Europe's crayfish before a plague took them. For most of the last century the place was spelled Eğridir, which in Turkish reads as it is crooked, and in 1985 the letters were rearranged.
The strip between the water and the mountains is one orchard after another, since Isparta grows a quarter of the country's apples, and from September the ladders stand in the trees and the crates stack at the gates on the lake road, sold to whoever stops. The path up Eğirdir Sivrisi, the pointed hill behind the town, passes the scattered ruins of Prostanna, a Pisidian city, before a steep final pull to the summit and the whole lake below, and from December the open water carries dense rafts of coot, pochard and tufted duck with grebes and cormorants working between them, counted in the January census. The lake is swum from the beaches of the island in summer. Eğirdir is a lake with a town walking into it, and the fish on the island's plates changed the water.