🦶 CRYPTID SIGHTING · EXP. Nº0555 ACTIVE

Lake Van Monster

Lake Van Monster is a cryptid — a creature whose existence is unconfirmed by science — with reported sightings near Lake Van, Eastern Anatolia, TR. This file collects the accounts and folklore surrounding it.

Where and when was Lake Van Monster sighted?

Location: Lake Van, Eastern Anatolia, TR
Date sighted: Unknown
Coordinates: 38.65, 42.9
Testimonies: 0
Last updated: 2026-08-31

LOCATION

What is Lake Van Monster?

The Lake Van Monster has something almost no cryptid has: a signed confession. On 8 June 2025 the journalist Mehmet Çetingüleç published a column titled "I am the inventor of the Lake Van monster". In 1993, as parliamentary correspondent for the daily Sabah, he watched alarm over the lake's rising water reach parliament, where a deputy for Bitlis, Zeki Ergezen, was made chairman of an inquiry into it. Çetingüleç went to him with a pitch: nobody will read a story about water levels, but say you are investigating the Lake Van monster and it runs everywhere, even abroad, and the tourists come. Ergezen laughed, then agreed. The story ran in two papers, the country's new private channels rented boats to hunt the creature, and one of them trailed its evening bulletin with footage that turned out to be a swimming water buffalo. What came next was real enough: a 1995 tape sold for 35,000 dollars, a book from the university press in 1996, Ünal Kozak's video sold worldwide in 1997, a four-metre statue in Gevaş in 2004. What never came was an animal. Lake Van is the world's largest soda lake, and the only fish in it is the endemic pearl mullet.

What is the history of Lake Van Monster?

The oldest written notice anyone has produced for a monster at Lake Van is not about the lake. In the fourth volume of his Seyahatname the seventeenth-century traveller Evliya Çelebi tells how two dragons lived at a place called Ali Kayası on Mount Süphan; one was turned to stone near Erzurum, the other was killed on the lakeshore by Ali with the sword Zülfikar, and its two young were sealed inside the rock when Ali prayed at the mouth of their cave. Evliya went to that cave himself. He wrote that he heard sounds and that seeing the creature was not granted to him. Reading the passage through Okumuş's edition, the folklorist Mustafa Gürbüz Beydiz points out the obvious and rarely quoted detail: Evliya's dragons live on the mountain, and there is no account in him of anything living in the lake. In the same pages Evliya records that Lake Van holds no fish at all except for one month a year where the Bendimahi river enters it — which is the spawning run of the pearl mullet, still the only fish in the lake today. The next notice is a newspaper item. On 29 April 1889 — 28 Şaban 1306, and the two calendars agree — issue 1323 of the Istanbul paper Saadet reported that three men from Hizan, walking the shore between Tatvan and Ahlat, had stopped so that one could perform his ablutions; a "sea animal" seized his foot, his companions burned its tail with fire to make it let go, and it leapt twenty to twenty-five metres into the air and carried him down into the water. The text reached modern readers through the magazine Yedikıta in October 2010 and was publicised by İkram Kali of the Van History and Culture Research Association, who believes in the creature and who nonetheless noted the difficulty himself: the 1889 animal kills a man, while every modern witness insists the monster harms no one. What made the Lake Van Monster famous, however, has a documented author and a date. In 1993 the level of the lake began to rise; the alarm reached parliament, where the Welfare Party deputy for Bitlis, Zeki Ergezen, and nine colleagues tabled a motion and Ergezen was elected chairman of the resulting inquiry. Mehmet Çetingüleç, then parliamentary correspondent for the daily Sabah, went to see him with a proposal, and in June 2025 he published it in his own words. The story ran in Sabah and Yeni Yüzyıl, and, as he put it, it did not so much appear as explode. Everything afterwards is real and verifiable: the footage a Van journalist, İbrahim İlhan, shot in 1995 and sold for 35,000 dollars after Fatih Altaylı carried it to Istanbul and Nurseli İdiz broadcast it on Show TV; a deputy governor, Bestami Alkan, saying he had seen it, so that the press briefly nicknamed the creature Bestami; a book published in 1996 by the university's own press, written by the chemistry professor Mustafa Yalçın Nutku with a young teaching assistant, Ünal Kozak; Kozak's June 1997 tape, which the agency WTN sold to CNN and the world; and, in October 2004, a four-metre statue at the entrance to Gevaş.

Timeline: the documented record of Lake Van Monster

17th century Evliya Çelebi describes in book four of his Seyahatname two dragons at Ali Kayası on Mount Süphan, one killed by Ali with the sword Zülfikar and two young sealed inside the rock. He visits the cave, hears sounds and never sees anything. Read closely, his dragons live on the mountain, not in the lake.
29 April 1889 Issue 1323 of the Istanbul newspaper Saadet reports that a creature seized a man performing his ablutions between Tatvan and Ahlat and carried him into the lake. The item was recovered in October 2010 by the magazine Yedikıta and publicised by İkram Kali, who notes that this animal kills while the modern one is said to be harmless.
1993 The level of Lake Van begins to rise. Welfare Party deputy for Bitlis Zeki Ergezen and nine colleagues table a motion; parliament sets up an inquiry and elects Ergezen chairman. Sabah's parliamentary correspondent Mehmet Çetingüleç suggests calling it a monster inquiry, writes the story, and it runs in Sabah and Yeni Yüzyıl.
1994 and 1997 The Armenian studies scholar James R. Russell, in Van in those two years, records that the Kurds he met considered the lake monster story "a commercial ploy and a farce", and rejects any link between the modern sightings and the Armenian vishaps of the lake.
1995 Van journalist İbrahim İlhan films a dark shape after two months of watching the shore. Fatih Altaylı takes the tape to Istanbul, where Nurseli İdiz broadcasts it on Show TV; İlhan sells it for 35,000 dollars. Altaylı's own description of the footage: there was no clear monster, just a largish shadow moving under the water.
1996 Van Gölü canavarı is published by the printing house of Yüzüncü Yıl University itself. Its senior author is not a zoologist but Mustafa Yalçın Nutku, professor of chemistry at that university between 1991 and 1997; the second author is the teaching assistant Ünal Kozak.
12 June 1997 The agency WTN distributes Kozak's amateur video of something long and dark in the middle of the lake. The dispatch, carried by CNN, says the pictures have been sent to Cambridge University for examination and that Jacques Cousteau is expected to visit. Cousteau dies on 25 June, thirteen days later.
1–3 October 2004 Gevaş erects a four-metre statue designed in a week by the art teacher Murat Allahverdi from witnesses' descriptions. Mayor Nazmi Sezer says the monster is real, that he saw it in 1997 and 1998, and that those who deny it damage tourism. Two days later Murat Bardakçı writes that he is in favour of keeping the rumour alive, for the same reason.
3 and 30 June 2007 The Turkish Wikipedia article is created describing the creature as resembling a Plesiosaurus or an Ichthyosaurus — the only zoological identification on record, and unsourced. Twenty-seven days later the same editor attributes the criticism of Kozak's video to "biologists at Cambridge University", also without a source. Both sentences are still there.
12 March 2021 Journo publishes Sıddık Güler's reconstruction of the affair as a media phenomenon born of the ratings war between Turkey's new private channels. Fatih Altaylı's conclusion: it was a journalistic success, but more than that a marketing one — and "we never managed to create a story like Loch Ness".
8 June 2025 Mehmet Çetingüleç publishes his confession in Kısa Dalga: he invented the monster inquiry to get the water-level story into print and bring tourists to Van, and the footage one channel trailed as the monster was a black water buffalo. "I made it up — but out of love of country and nation."
July 2025 Van 65 Haber reports that the Gevaş statue has been taken down one night without notice or explanation, and that nothing was put in its place. The journalist Yusuf İdiz protests that a tourism opportunity has been squandered. The report gives no date for the removal.

Is there a rational explanation for Lake Van Monster?

The case does not need a debunker. It has a confession, signed and dated. On 8 June 2025 Mehmet Çetingüleç published a column in Kısa Dalga headed "Holiday confession: I am the inventor of the Lake Van monster". He describes going to Zeki Ergezen after the parliamentary inquiry into the rising water was set up and telling him: "If you now say you are going to investigate the rise in the water level of Lake Van, that will not be news anywhere. But if you say you are going to investigate the Lake Van monster, the story will run everywhere, even in the foreign press." Ergezen laughed, thought about it, and said: "You know, you're right. Let's do it." Çetingüleç wrote the story; every paper and channel in the country turned up at Ergezen's door; television crews rented boats on the lake, and one channel trailed its evening bulletin with the announcement that it had filmed the monster. "And they really had filmed something," he writes. "Not a swimming monster, but a black water buffalo." His own verdict on the whole business: "I made it up — but out of love of country and nation." The commercial motive was never really hidden. In Hürriyet on 2 October 2004, the mayor of Gevaş, Nazmi Sezer, who had just erected the statue, said that people who denied the monster were damaging the region's tourism, and added that the creature "is real, it exists", that he had seen it in 1997 and 1998, that its head was like a horse's and its tail serrated. The day before, in the same paper, he had said it appeared once, seven years earlier, and was never seen again. On 3 October the historian Murat Bardakçı devoted his column to the statue and wrote plainly that whether or not the monster exists he is in favour of the rumour staying in the news, because that is how Loch Ness turned an empty glen into a tourist economy. The lake itself is the strongest argument. Lake Van is the largest soda lake in the world: pH about 9.8, salinity 21.4 parts per thousand, alkalinity around 153 milliequivalents per litre. Şentürk and colleagues, sampling nine points in January 2020, measured pH between 9.38 and 9.57 and dissolved oxygen between 3.9 and 4.2 mg/l. In water like that the entire fish fauna of a lake of 3,775 km² is one species, the endemic pearl mullet Alburnus tarichi, which cannot even breed in the lake and runs up the freshwater streams between April and July to spawn. Besides it there are plankton and chironomid larvae. A fifteen-metre predator needs something to eat, and there is nothing. One line in this file's own previous text needed chasing, because it is the kind of sentence that survives by sounding institutional: "the images were sent to Cambridge University for examination". That is exactly what the WTN dispatch of 12 June 1997 says — no department, no name, no result, and no source for the claim beyond the report itself. The verdict that circulates in Turkish media and in AI summaries — that biologists at Cambridge watched the tape and concluded the creature moved too straight to be an animal — is not in that dispatch. It can be dated precisely. Sweeping all 177 revisions of the Turkish Wikipedia article, the criticism about the perfectly straight course and the boat pulling on a rope appears unattributed on 3 June 2007; twenty-seven days later, on 30 June 2007, the same editor rewrote it so that the observation belongs to "biologists at Cambridge University". No source was added then and none has been added since. As of August 2026 I have found no analysis of Kozak's footage published by anyone at Cambridge; searching the university's own domains returns nothing on Lake Van, while the same search for the Loch Ness monster returns the papers of Peter Scott, who directed the Loch Ness Phenomena Investigation Bureau, held in the university library. The same sweep dates two other things. The description of the creature as resembling a Plesiosaurus or an Ichthyosaurus — the only zoological identification anyone has ever offered — was written on 3 June 2007 by the editor who created that article, without a source, in a text that called the monster an imaginary being. On 26 December 2008 an anonymous address changed "imaginary being" to "wild creature" and moved the first mention from 1995 to 1993. No naturalist, in any period, has proposed a species; the surviving marine reptile arrived on an encyclopaedia page in 2007 and has been repeated ever since. The WTN report closed by saying that Jacques Cousteau was expected to come and examine the lake. Cousteau died on 25 June 1997, thirteen days after the story went out. He never came.

Can you visit Lake Van Monster?

There is nothing to visit that has anything to do with a monster, and the first thing to say is that the statue is gone. The four-metre figure the Gevaş municipality put at the entrance to the town bazaar in October 2004 — a clawed creature holding a blue-painted model of Lake Van, which several Turkish papers read as an imitation of Godzilla — was taken down one night without notice or explanation. Van 65 Haber reported the removal in July 2025, attributing the original commission to mayor Nazmi Sezer and the decision to remove it to his successor, Sinan Hakan; the report gives no date and no reason, and nothing was put in its place. Travel pages that still send visitors to photograph it are out of date. What is worth the journey is the lake itself and Akdamar. The island church of the Holy Cross, built between 915 and 921 for King Gagik I Artsruni by the architect Manuel, carries the finest programme of exterior relief carving in Armenian architecture — Adam and Eve, David and Goliath, Jonah thrown to the sea monster — and has been on the UNESCO tentative list since 2015. It is reached only by boat, from the Akdamar pier near Gevaş, about 45–50 km south-west of Van on the İpekyolu road; minibuses to Gevaş leave from Van's intercity bus station. Boats go when they fill and the crossing takes twenty to twenty-five minutes. According to the Van city guide of April 2026, admission was 200 lira, 100 for students, the ticket office worked from 08:30 to 17:00, and the Müzekart is valid because the island is classified as an archaeological site; the boat fare is separate and charged by the operators. A liturgy is celebrated on the island on the first Sunday of September, and the almond trees flower in April and May. Two practical notes. The water is strongly alkaline and soapy to the touch; it stings the eyes, and swimmers should rinse. And if you want to see the one animal in the story that is definitely there, come between April and July, when the pearl mullet run up the rivers that feed the lake — Muradiye and the Bendimahi are the classic spots — in the same migration Evliya Çelebi described in the seventeenth century. Van Ferit Melen airport has daily flights from Istanbul and Ankara.

Sources consulted

Reviewed by V. Serrano on 2026-08-15 · How we verify our content

📎 Source: Enigma Atlas

Lake Van Monster

Where and when was Lake Van Monster sighted?

What is Lake Van Monster?

What is the history of Lake Van Monster?

Timeline: the documented record of Lake Van Monster

Is there a rational explanation for Lake Van Monster?

Can you visit Lake Van Monster?

Sources consulted

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Lake Van Monster

Where and when was Lake Van Monster sighted?

What is Lake Van Monster?

What is the history of Lake Van Monster?

Timeline: the documented record of Lake Van Monster

Is there a rational explanation for Lake Van Monster?

Can you visit Lake Van Monster?

Sources consulted

💬 Field testimonies (0)

Add your testimony

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