Uzungöl is a lake whose own dam has never been explained. Something blocked the Haldizen valley in the Soğanlı Mountains and ponded the stream into a long sheet of water at 1,090 metres; local accounts credit a landslide four centuries ago, but nobody has proved it, and in January 2026 a landslide research team from Karadeniz Technical University and the state disaster agency began the fieldwork meant to settle the question. What the barrier left is small — the ministry's own survey puts it at about eight and a half hectares, under seven metres deep — and nine-tenths of the water arrives down the Haldizen. What raises this valley above the hundreds like it in the eastern Black Sea is the arrangement around the water: Oriental spruce standing almost black on the slopes, Oriental beech mixed through it, and a village of wooden houses right at the waterline with its minaret doubled on the surface.
Come early and the valley is quiet, with cloud sitting low on the forest and the far slope reflected sharply on the water. As you walk along the shore the reflection changes with you, showing a different stretch of forest and village at every point. In late October and early November the beech turns gold and copper against the spruce. What the photographs leave out is how young all this is. Forty years ago the flat ground here was a maize field; trout farms opened restaurants, hotels were built onto the restaurants, and by 2025 Uzungöl was counting over four million visitors a year, more than a million in August alone. The building went too far and the state is now undoing it: demolition crews have been taking down the illegal blocks along the shore since December 2019, and new hotels are held to three storeys. Come outside August and the valley in the pictures is still there.