Eymir is a lake inside the boundaries of Ankara, and the land around it belongs to the Middle East Technical University. The university's rowing and sailing teams train here and keep a boathouse on the shore. The lake has a fauna and flora of its own, and its name has become so closely tied to the university that the foundation set up by its graduates in 1986 is called the Eymir Culture Foundation.
The green around the water is not original. A traveller's notes from the 1930s, by Nahid Sırrı Örik, describe the surroundings as entirely barren, without any greenery at all. In 1956 a tract of forty-five square kilometres, the lake included, was allocated to the newly founded university, and through the 1960s the rector Kemal Kurdaş pushed a planting programme that turned the whole area into woodland in the middle of the steppe. In 1995 Kurdaş and the university's afforestation director Alattin Egemen were jointly given the Aga Khan Award for Architecture for that work.
The lake is fed from its neighbour. Mogan and Eymir are linked by a channel that passes beneath the Ankara–Konya highway, and since Eymir lies three metres lower, water moves from Mogan through a regulator into Eymir. Thick alluvial beds between the two lakes also draw in what the Kepekliboğazı stream and the smaller creeks collect after rain, so part of the supply arrives from below. Eymir drains eastward into the İmrahor valley, where its overflow becomes the İmrahor stream.
Both lakes formed the same way, dammed behind material carried down from Elmadağ — gravel and sand piled into cones across an older valley until the water behind them stood still. They have not always been separate: the traveller Kandemir records in his book on the province of Ankara that after the heavy rains of 1910 the two briefly joined at the surface and became a single lake. Near the rowing club's boathouse, inside the woods, stands the Barış Çeşmesi, a fountain built in 1963.
When to go
- Climate
- Across Ankara as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from 0.4 °C in January to 23.6 °C in August; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in May, June, July, August and September; rainfall is heaviest in May (52 mm) and lightest in August (13 mm). Long-term means for 1927-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
