Түркиядағы Егірдир көлі

Lake in Turkey

Eğirdir (Eğirdir Gölü, formerly Eğridir) is a lake in the Lakes Region of Turkey. The town of Eğirdir lies near its southern end, north of Antalya. With an area of it is the fourth largest lake in Turkey, and the second largest freshwater lake.

The town and the lake were formerly called Eğridir, a Turkish pronunciation of the town's old Greek name Akrotiri. Eğridir means "it is crooked" in Turkish, so to remove the negative connotations, in the mid 1980s the "i" and the "r" were transposed in a new official name, thus creating Eğirdir, a name that evokes spinning and flowers, although many people in Turkey still call both the town and the lake by its former name.

Lake Eğirdir must have existed in ancient times, since coins from the nearby city of Parlaos have been found with ships on them, but no clear references to the lake have been found in ancient texts, and its ancient name is unknown. A number of ancient settlements have been located around the lake: places whose names are known were Eğirdir itself (historically known as Akroterion), Parlaos, Malos, and Prostanna; and places whose ancient names are not known were at the ruin sites of Bedre, Ghaziri, and Ertokuş Han, as well as on Yeşil Ada. (Based on its modern name, Bedre – now known as Gökçe – may have been called "Petra" in ancient times.) In the 14th century, Ibn Batutta mentioned merchant shipping on the lake at Eğirdir (or Akrīdūr, as he called the city in Arabic).

Lake Eğirdir is fed by about 40 different springs, some of which are intermittent, and also by rainfall within its 3,309 km2 drainage basin. Besides evaporation, water exits Lake Eğirdir either by flowing out through the Kovada Canal into Lake Kovada, by draining out into one of the about 20 natural ponors that exist at the bottom of the lake, or by being pumped out through one of the 11 irrigation pumps built around the lake. The lake has an average depth of 7 m and a maximum depth of 13 m. Of these, 7 are endemic species that still inhabit the lake, 2 are endemic species that are now locally extinct, 4 are introduced species, 1 is of uncertain origin but is native to the area, and 1 is of unknown status but likely an exotic species. It is not native to the lake, but when exactly it was introduced is unknown.

Lake Eğirdir forms part of the Eğirdir Kovada graben, a north–south depression that also includes Lake Kovada. Two distinct stages of geological deposits are visible on dry land. Deposits from the first stage are exposed above ground in the Yeşilköy area; this is called the Yeşilköy Formation. This may have been deposited by the prehistoric Gölcük Volcano, 50 km to the southwest near the city of Isparta. The second phase is recent alluvial sedimentary deposits from Quaternary times, especially visible in areas around Eğirdir and Barla as well as around Lake Kovada. This region is very seismically active; for example, in March 2007, a magnitude 5.1 earthquake happened on the lake's eastern shore, along the Esinyurt Fault; it was followed by 93 smaller aftershocks over a period of 4 days.