by Gurkan Avci
Winner of Stories For Survival, the 2025 PureTravel Writing Competition
Judges comments:
This is one of the shortest entries this year – but also perhaps the most powerful. Written in deceptively straightforward prose, it has moments of really poignant poetry. I loved the image of the road from Konya that was “a straight line of heat and dust” – it took me straight into the car alongside the writer, driving out across the Anatolian plain. The ‘stubborn smudge of blue’, the ‘silent scream of what had been lost’, the ‘hands that took more than they gave’ – these are wonderfully simple phrases that pack considerable punch. A vivid, interesting, poignant piece of writing – deeply affecting.
The Dust of Akşehir
I went to Akşehir last summer, not because I expected much, but because it was there, in the stories my father used to tell,stories of a lake so wide it mirrored the sky, so alive it sang with reeds and birds. He’d sit on the edge of our sagging couch, his voice rough from years of tobacco, and paint Akşehir Gölü like a lost Eden between the Sultan and Emir mountains. I suppose I went to see if any of it was true, or if it was just another of his exaggerations, like the fish he swore were big as my arm.
The road from Konya was a straight line of heat and dust, the kind that sticks to your skin and makes you question why you ever left home. I drove with the windows down, the air thick with the scent of dry earth. My map said the lake was still there, straddling the border of Konya and Afyonkarahisar, a stubborn smudge of blue in the heart of Anatolia. But maps lie. When I arrived, there was no water, no reeds, no birds, just a vast, cracked plain, a desert where a lake should have been. I stepped out of the car, and the ground crunched under my boots like brittle bones.
I stood there, staring at the emptiness, and felt something shift inside me. It wasn’t just disappointment; it was heavier, a kind of betrayal. This wasn’t the Akşehir of my father’s tales. This was a graveyard of water, a silent scream of what had been lost. The wind kicked up, carrying fine sand that stung my eyes, and I saw the outlines of what might have been: the ghost of a shoreline, the faint curve where boats once bobbed. I thought of the fish, the herons, the frogs. Where had they gone? Had they died with the lake, or had they fled, abandoning this place to its fate?
I walked further, my shoes sinking into the parched soil, and found a single wooden post, half-buried, maybe a relic of a dock. I sat beside it, the sun burning my neck, and tried to imagine the lake as it was. But all I could see was what it had become, a mirror not of the sky, but of neglect, of summers too hot and winters too dry, of hands that took more than they gave. My father’s voice echoed in my head, telling me how he’d swum there as a boy, how the water was cold even in July. I wanted to yell at him, “You lied!” But he hadn’t lied. The lie was ours, collective and unspoken, in letting it disappear.
That moment, sitting in the dust of Akşehir, was my turning point. I’d always thought of nature as something eternal, a backdrop to our little lives. But here it was, fragile, mortal, gone. I drove back in silence, the desert stretching behind me, and knew I’d never see the world the same way again. It wasn’t just a lake that dried up that day, it was a piece of me, a piece of us all.
Photo by Batuhan Doğan on Unsplash
