Tortum Waterfall is a fall of 48 metres at the outlet of Lake Tortum in the Uzundere district of Erzurum province, in eastern Türkiye, a lake made in an instant when a mountainside slid across the valley and dammed the river, and it is looked at from a glass terrace cantilevered over the lake, walked down to by a long stone stairway to the pool at its foot and seen at its fullest in May and June, when the snowmelt runs the whole twenty-metre lip as one white sheet. Nobody knows the year the mountain fell, only that the lake eight kilometres long and the fall at its outlet were born together, the water finding its way over the landslide dam and dropping into a gorge of sheer rock; eleven kilometres from Uzundere the Erzurum to Artvin road passes the Pirinkayalar glass terrace, a glass floor 143 metres above the lake with the water green and long between the mountains below, and at the fall the stairway with its iron railing drops from the rim to the plunge pool, where the spray soaks the steps and the rainbow stands in the mist once the sun has cleared the gorge rim and strikes it head-on, so a morning visit leaves the spray grey.
The flow is not the operator's goodwill, since a hydroelectric plant of the 1960s diverts the lake's water through a tunnel and the fall ran dry for years in the dry months, until a court order fixed a minimum flow that must cross the lip, and the snowmelt fills the lake faster than the plant can take it in late spring, when the whole width goes over; by August the fall is a thread and the plant has the rest. The road along the lake is the way to the Georgian churches of the valleys of Tao, Öşkvank and İşhan, and the tea gardens of Uzundere serve the visitors. Tortum is a waterfall born of a landslide, and a court decides how much of it falls.