Turkish rivers, lakes and seas, found on the map

Lakes4 on the map

Lake Tuz

Lake Tuz is the second largest lake in the country and one of the saltiest in the world. It is almost nowhere more than a meter or two deep and dries out over the summer to a salt crust that can be driven on, which supplies a large share of the country’s table salt.

Lake Van

Lake Van is the largest lake in Türkiye at about 3,755 square kilometers and the largest soda lake in the world. Nothing flows out of it, so the water is alkaline enough to wash clothes in and supports only one fish. It sits at 1,640 meters and is dammed by lava from the volcano Nemrut at its western end.

Also on the mapLake Beyşehir · Lake Eğirdir

Reservoirs2 on the map

Atatürk Reservoir

The Atatürk Dam, finished in 1990, is one of the largest earth-and-rock dams in the world and holds back about 48 cubic kilometers of water. Its reservoir is the third largest in the country and irrigates the Harran plain through two tunnels of 26 kilometers each.

Also on the mapKeban Reservoir

Rivers10 on the map

Aras

The Aras rises near Erzurum and forms much of the border with Armenia, Azerbaijan and Iran before joining the Kura and reaching the Caspian. Mount Ararat, at 5,137 meters the highest in the country, stands in the angle of land it wraps around.

Büyük Menderes

This is the river the word meander comes from: the Greeks called it the Maeander and used its name for the way it wanders across its own floodplain. It has silted up its lower valley so thoroughly that Miletus and Priene, both ports in antiquity, now stand several kilometers inland.

Euphrates

The Euphrates is the longest river in western Asia at about 2,800 kilometers, and roughly a third of it is in Türkiye, where nearly all of its water comes from. The Southeastern Anatolia Project has built more than twenty dams on it and the Tigris since the 1970s, which is a permanent argument with Syria and Iraq downstream.

Kızılırmak

The Kızılırmak is about 1,350 kilometers long and is the longest river that begins and ends inside Türkiye. Its name means red river, for the clay it carries. The Hittites called it the Halys, and it was the border Croesus of Lydia crossed in 547 BC after the oracle told him he would destroy a great empire, which turned out to be his own.

Meriç

The Meriç is the Maritsa in Bulgaria and the Evros in Greece, and it forms about 200 kilometers of the Turkish border with Greece. Edirne sits at the meeting of three of its arms, which is why the Ottoman capital was there.

Sakarya

The Sakarya is about 824 kilometers long, the third longest inside the country. The battle fought along it in August and September 1921 lasted twenty-one days and stopped the Greek advance on Ankara, which turned the war of independence. It was the Sangarius of the Greeks.

Tigris

The Tigris rises in the mountains near Elazığ and runs about 1,850 kilometers to join the Euphrates in southern Iraq. Diyarbakır sits on its upper course. The Ilısu Dam, filled in 2020, flooded the town of Hasankeyf, which had been inhabited for around twelve thousand years.

Also on the mapCeyhan · Kelkit · Murat

Seas and oceans6 on the map

Aegean Sea

The Aegean holds well over a thousand islands, most of them Greek and many of them within sight of the Turkish shore. The sea floor is the boundary where the African plate pushes under the Aegean one, which is why the whole basin is volcanic and prone to earthquakes.

Black Sea

The Black Sea is the largest body of water in the world with no oxygen below a certain depth: about 90 percent of its volume, everything under roughly 150 meters, is anoxic. Wooden shipwrecks down there survive almost intact because the organisms that would eat them cannot live in it.

Bosporus

The Bosporus is about 31 kilometers long and 700 meters across at its narrowest, which makes it one of the narrowest straits used for international navigation. Around 40,000 vessels pass through it a year. The Montreux Convention of 1936 governs that traffic and gives Türkiye control of it.

Dardanelles

The Dardanelles is about 61 kilometers long and 1.2 kilometers across at its narrowest. Xerxes bridged it with boats in 480 BC to invade Greece, and Byron swam it in 1810 in imitation of Leander. Its shores were the Gallipoli campaign of 1915.

Mediterranean Sea

The Turkish stretch of the Mediterranean coast runs about 1,600 kilometers. The sea itself loses far more water to evaporation than its rivers put back, so a steady current runs in through Gibraltar to make up the difference, and the whole basin dried out almost completely around five million years ago.

Sea of Marmara

The Marmara is about 280 kilometers long and lies entirely within Turkish waters, which is unusual for a sea. It takes its name from the island of Marmara, quarried for white marble since antiquity. The North Anatolian Fault runs along its floor.