Uzungöl is a small lake at 1,090 metres in a valley of spruce in the eastern Black Sea mountains of Türkiye, in Trabzon province, with a wooden village built into its shore and a mosque at its waterline whose twin minarets are reflected in the water in every photograph, and it is walked around, looked down on from the slopes and eaten beside, on trout from the farms that came before the hotels. The lake is a stopped stream, the Haldizen pressed between two walls of spruce, and every guidebook says a landslide blocked the valley, though nobody has proved it; the village of Şerah stands on the shore, and the path around the water passes the wooden houses first, then the trout ponds, then the stacked hotels, each reflected upside down on the surface, with the mosque, built in 2002 after the resort around it, at the far end. From the terraces on the forested slope above the village the lake finally reads as what it is, a green valley floor with the minaret a white pin at the end and cloud drifting down the spruce, and at dusk the minarets light up and the whole village is redrawn on the water in gold and red.
The trout farms came first and the hotels were built onto their restaurants, so grilled trout with cornbread and a pan of stringy kuymak is the local order, and forest roads climb from the shore to the highland pastures at Şekersu and Demirkapı, where wooden summer houses stand loose in the meadow, since more than half the households at the lake still move up to the yaylas in June and come down in September. In the villages around the lake a few thousand people, most of them old, still speak Romeyka, a Greek so archaic it kept the ancient infinitive. From late October the beech mixed through the spruce turns gold and copper against the near-black evergreen, and in winter the snow passes a metre. Uzungöl is a lake with a village mirrored in it, and the mosque is younger than the tourists.