Lake Tuz supplies roughly two-thirds of the salt Turkey eats, and it does it by disappearing. It is the country's second-largest lake, about 1,665 square kilometres in spring, yet you could wade almost anywhere across it without wetting your knees: half a metre deep on average, barely a metre even in May, its fullest month. Its basin on the Anatolian plateau is among Turkey's driest land, fed by some 324 millimetres of rain a year, and the lake has no outlet, so each summer the sun simply takes the water back. What stays behind is brine at 32 to 34 percent salt, close to ten times the sea, and then, by August, a white crust averaging thirty centimetres thick, hard enough to run machines across.
In spring the plain turns into a mirror. A few centimetres of runoff lie over the salt, and on a windless morning that thin layer reflects the whole sky, so the clouds appear to pass beneath your boots and the horizon is hard to make out. By July the shrinking brine turns pink, then almost red, as Dunaliella salina algae and salt-loving microbes flood themselves with pigment against the glare. Out in the middle, on islands the water keeps safe, greater flamingos raise their chicks in colonies of five to six thousand nests — their most important breeding ground in Turkey. That colony is why the lake is now fought over. Wells and diverted canals have taken the streams that fed it; in July 2021 the water drained from beneath the nests, the chicks died where they stood, and by October the lake had dried out completely. The ministry counted about a thousand dead, conservationists five times that, and the two sides still argue over whether irrigation was to blame. Wet years bring it back — in the summer of 2026 some 5,000 chicks hatched across two colonies, roughly double the year before.