Issyk-Kul

Issyk-Kul is a sea set high in the Tian Shan: a lake 182 kilometres long and up to 60 wide, lying at 1,607 metres between two parallel walls of mountains — the Kungey Ala-Too on the north shore, which divides Kyrgyzstan from Kazakhstan, and the higher, snowier Teskey Ala-Too on the south. It is the second-largest mountain lake in the world after Titicaca, among the ten deepest on Earth at 668 metres. Its name means "hot lake", and it earns it: fed by some 118 rivers and streams, hot springs among them, and slightly salty, with about a sixth of the salinity of seawater, it hardly ever freezes despite the altitude and the hard winters.

The setting is the great spectacle: the rivers of the Teskey cut deep, wide valleys through the range and spread in fans of gravel at the shore, while the lake itself lies like an inland sea between the ridges. The north shore became the Soviet Union's favourite mountain resort, with sanatoria and holiday homes clustered around Cholpon-Ata, where an open-air field holds some 2,000 petroglyphs made between about 800 BC and AD 1200, and a local museum. At the eastern end, Karakol keeps a wooden Dungan mosque built without metal nails and a wooden Orthodox church, and serves as the base for treks into the Teskey.

The lake has a long human story. It was a stopover on the Silk Road; the Chinese monk Xuanzang described it in the 7th century, and Qing records called it Temurtu-Nor, the "Iron Lake". Genetic studies of graves near its shores in 2022 showed the Black Death present here in 1338–1339, supporting the view that the pandemic began in this region before it spread across Eurasia. The water level stood about eight metres lower in the Middle Ages, and divers have found drowned settlements in its shallows, among them a 13th-century town submerged after 15th-century earthquakes. Issyk-Kul has been a Ramsar wetland since 1975 and the core of a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve since 2000, and it shelters endemic fish found nowhere else.

Getting there

The lake is best reached from Cholpon-Ata or Karakol on its shores; Kyzyl-Suu on the south shore is about 60 km from the centre of the lake. Issyk-Kul International Airport (IKU) near Tamchy on the north shore is the nearest, about 50 km away, with mostly seasonal flights; the lake is otherwise reached by road.