The reeds along the shore go still, gulls turn overhead, and somewhere in the distance a pink shadow of flamingo flickers past. And there in the grass—a horse. Just standing. Or perhaps waiting.
It is worth knowing what they are all standing beside.
Lake Van has no outlet. Water comes in and only leaves by evaporating, which over a few hundred thousand years has left behind everything the rivers were carrying. The result is a soda lake with a pH of about 9.8—somewhere between washing-up water and household bleach. Villagers used to bring their laundry down to the shore and save on soap.
Almost nothing can live in it. Almost. One fish manages: the pearl mullet, inci kefali, found nowhere else on earth. It spends its life in water that ought to kill it, and then each spring, unable to spawn in the stuff, it swims up the freshwater streams in enormous silver crowds to lay its eggs in conditions its own lake cannot supply. That run happens in May. It was happening while this photograph was being taken.
The flamingos come for the same reason flamingos always come to soda lakes: brine shrimp and algae flourish where fish cannot, and a flamingo asks for nothing more.
As for the local celebrity, that is the Van cat—white, frequently odd-eyed, one iris blue and the other amber, and famously willing to swim, which is not a thing cats are supposed to be willing to do.
Rather fewer people know about the Van hedgehog. Very rare. Very silent.
“Little he-e-e-dgehog…”—not a call, but wind in the reeds.
(Anyone who grew up east of a certain line will have heard that already and be somewhere in a white fog by now, following a horse. Everyone else is directed to Yuri Norstein’s Hedgehog in the Fog, twenty minutes long, and once voted the greatest animated film ever made. It concerns a hedgehog, a horse standing in mist, and a friend waiting with the samovar.)
And the evening becomes a little bit of a fairy tale.
