Mogan is a barrier lake in the Gölbaşı district, twenty kilometres south of Ankara, sharing its basin with the smaller Eymir. It lies inside the Gölbaşı Special Environmental Protection Area, one of fifteen such zones declared in Türkiye under the Barcelona Convention, and it is both a working wetland and one of the city's places to spend a day outdoors.
The lake is not old and did not always exist. What is now open water was once a stream valley, until alluvium carried down by the Sukesen, Başpınar, Gölova and Yavrucak creeks blocked its lower end and the water backed up behind it. Hills close it in on the north, east and west, while to the south it widens towards the plain. It covers six and a third square kilometres, holds some fourteen million cubic metres, and averages only three and a half to four metres deep — four and a half at its deepest in dry spells, five when the water is high — across a shape roughly six kilometres by nine hundred metres, with fourteen kilometres of shore.
The name has no traceable origin and is thought to have been coined at some point after the fact, which has left room for a story. As it is told locally, two young people from a village by the water, Monza and Ganey, fell in love and were refused by both families; each fled to a hill on opposite sides of the valley and wept without stopping until their tears collected into a lake, and the place took the first syllables of their names. The account is a local legend rather than a record of anything.
For birds the lake matters a good deal: two hundred and twenty-six species have been recorded here over the years, among them the white-headed duck and the ferruginous duck. Water management matters too. A regulator was built between Mogan and Eymir in 1972 to hold back floods, and after the heavy rains of 2010 and 2011 its gates were opened for the first time in many years — which prevented a flood here and raised the level of Eymir at the same time.
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).
