Lake Van is the largest soda lake on Earth, in eastern Türkiye, 3,700 square kilometres of water at 1,640 metres between the volcanoes of Süphan and Nemrut, soapy to the touch, home to one fish found nowhere else, with a tenth-century Armenian church on its island of Akdamar, and it is swum in July and August, crossed by boat to the church and eaten beside at the breakfast tables of the city of Van. The lake has no outlet, so the water that flows in concentrates into a soda that lathers with the oils on the skin, soft and slippery to wade into, and the carbonate towers rising from its bed are the largest microbialites ever found, some forty metres tall and still growing; the only fish is the pearl mullet, which leaves the soda water in May and June to spawn in the freshwater streams, leaping the Muradiye rapids in silver bursts, with fishing banned from mid-April to mid-July to let it through. Boats leave the Gevaş jetty when they fill and cross in twenty minutes to Akdamar, where the Church of the Holy Cross of 921 stands among almond trees, its outer walls carved with Bible scenes, vines and animals in relief, and the almonds flower white across the island from late March.
The city of Van is the base, and its breakfast is a regional institution, the herbed cheese otlu peynir, kavut, murtuğa, honey with clotted cream and a crowd of small dishes arriving at once with dark tea. The Van cat, chalk white, often with one blue eye and one amber, is the one cat that gets into the water and swims. The lake is calm before the day's wind gets up, when Süphan stands in it at first light, and the water warms enough to swim only in July and August, staying a cold, windswept inland sea the rest of the year. Lake Van is a sea of soda in the mountains, and the church on its island is the reason for the boat.