Erçek lies thirty kilometres east of Lake Van and is, at 114 square kilometres, the second largest body of water in the Van basin. Its surface sits at 1,808 metres; the lake averages eighteen and a half metres deep and reaches forty at its deepest. A single stream, the Memedik, feeds it from the east.
How it formed is still argued. The long-standing account treats it as a volcanic barrier lake, dammed by lava flows. More recent work disputes that, reporting that no volcanic dam can be found anywhere around the lake, and proposes instead that the basin was opened by east–west faults and the lake pan by north–south ones — which would make Erçek a young tectonic lake dating from the Upper Pleistocene.
The water is salty and sodic, alkaline enough that its pH has been recorded between 9.40 and 10.75, and no fish live in it naturally. In 1985 the provincial agriculture directorate began introducing pearl mullet fry taken from Lake Van, and repeated the stocking every year until 1992. Three cooperatives were set up and fishing was encouraged, but the effort failed because the cooperatives insisted on fishing during the spawning season; there is no professional fishery here now. Poaching still follows the fish when they crowd towards fresh water to spawn.
Birds are the reason to come. The lake is classed among the important bird areas, in the 'B' category of wetlands, the grouping that covers places holding species under threat. Hundreds of bird species use the water, and half of the 453 species recorded in Türkiye can be found in the Erçek basin — not only residents but migrants, flamingos among them, which stop here to rest and to breed.
When to go
- Climate
- Across Van as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from -3 °C in January to 22.4 °C in July; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in June, July, August and September; rainfall is heaviest in April (55 mm) and lightest in August (6 mm). Long-term means for 1939-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
