Darex: The Pearl Mullet of Lake Wan
Lake Wan — Gola Wanê, the vast soda sea at the heart of Northern Kurdistan — is so salty and alkaline that almost nothing can live in it. Almost. One fish has made the impossible its home: the pearl mullet, known in Kurdish as darex, a slim silver fish about the length of a hand that thrives where no other fish can. For the Kurdish villages around the lake, darex is not an exotic curiosity but dinner: fried in a pan (tava), grilled over coals, and — in the old way — salted and dried to last the winter. It is the one great protein the lake itself provides, pulled from water that should, by rights, be lifeless. Once a year the fish performs a miracle that draws crowds to the streams. In May and June, the darex leave the salt lake and swim up the freshwater rivers to spawn, hurling themselves upstream against the current and leaping over waterfalls like salmon, flashing silver through the air. Scientists at Kurdish universities study them as a wonder of adaptation — the only fish on earth that survives this particular soda chemistry, isolated in the lake for some eight hundred thousand years. The people of Wan have simply always known them: known when they run, where they leap, and how to take a winter’s food from a few precious weeks of plenty. This is the one-hundred-and-eighth article in the series, and its first about a fish. The darex belongs to everyone who has ever lived around Gola Wanê — the Armenians of the highlands knew it too, and called it taṙex — and this series honours that shared past. But the lake is Gola Wanê in Kurdish, the province is a Kurdish one, the fish carries a Kurdish name, and it has fed Kurdish tables for as long as anyone can remember.
Key Takeaways
• Darex (the pearl mullet, Alburnus tarichi) is the only fish able to live in Lake Wan’s soda water
• A staple of Kurdish villages around the lake — fried, grilled, or salted and dried for winter
• Each spring it migrates upstream and leaps waterfalls like salmon — a famous local spectacle
• Endemic and now Near Threatened; a seasonal fishing ban protects it during spawning
Quick Facts
Kurdish Name: Darex (Turkish: inci kefalı; Armenian: taṙex); species Alburnus tarichi
Home: Gola Wanê (Lake Van), shared by Van and Bitlis, Northern Kurdistan
Eaten: Pan-fried (tava) or grilled; traditionally salted and dried to preserve
Season: Spawning migration in May–June; a fishing ban protects the run (mid-April to mid-July)
At the Table
Darex is a simple fish treated simply. Cleaned and lightly salted, it is most often dredged in flour and fried in a pan — tava — until the skin crisps, or laid over coals and grilled, izgara, and eaten with bread, onions, and a squeeze of something sour. Its flesh is soft and its bones are fine, so it rewards quick, hot cooking. But the deeper tradition is preservation, and it is written into the fish’s very name: the species is called Alburnus tarichi, from the Greek for salted or preserved fish, because for centuries the catch from Lake Wan was salted and dried so it could be stored through winter and carried to market far from the shore. A glut of fish caught during the few weeks of the spring run could, salted down, feed a household for months — the same logic that turns autumn fruit into reçel and summer milk into buried cheese, applied here to the silver harvest of the lake. Fresh in spring, salted for the cold: darex is a lake’s entire larder in a single small fish.
The Jewel of Gola Wanê
The darex is sometimes called the jewel of Lake Wan, and the title is earned. Lake Wan is the largest soda lake on earth, its water so alkaline — a pH above nine — that it is hostile to almost all life; cut off by ancient volcanic activity hundreds of thousands of years ago, the pearl mullet adapted to survive there and now lives nowhere else in the world. That is why the spring migration matters so much: unable to breed in the salt, the fish must run up the freshwater streams to spawn, and it is then, leaping the rapids, that it has always been caught. This makes darex a perfect emblem of the wider ecology this series has traced around these mountains — the same Wan whose villages press wild herbs into cheese and whose slopes feed the bees their honey also holds, in its strange blue lake, a fish found in no other water on the planet. It is a food, but it is also a barometer: overfishing and pollution have pushed the darex onto the Near Threatened list, and the annual ban that halts fishing during the spawning run is now essential to its survival. There is an honest, shared history here, too. The lake sits in a land where Kurds and, historically, Armenians both lived, and both named the fish; this series does not pretend otherwise. But the lake is Gola Wanê, the fish is darex, and the communities who net it from the streams each spring and salt it for winter are, today, overwhelmingly Kurdish. To know this fish is to know something true about Wan that no map legend will tell you.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is darex?
Darex is the Kurdish name for the pearl mullet (Alburnus tarichi), a small silver fish endemic to Lake Wan (Lake Van). It is the only fish able to survive the lake’s salty, alkaline soda water, and it is a staple food for the Kurdish communities around the lake, eaten fried or grilled and traditionally salted and dried for winter. In Turkish it is called inci kefalı.
Why does it live only in Lake Wan?
Lake Wan is the world’s largest soda lake, with water so alkaline that almost no fish can live in it. The darex became isolated there by volcanic activity hundreds of thousands of years ago and slowly adapted to the harsh chemistry, becoming the only fish able to thrive in the lake. Because it cannot reproduce in the salt water, it migrates each spring into the freshwater streams to spawn, leaping upstream like a salmon.
How is darex eaten?
Most often it is floured and pan-fried (tava) until crisp, or grilled over coals (izgara), and served with bread and onions. Historically, and reflected in its scientific name, the fish was heavily salted and dried so it could be stored through the winter and traded — the same preservation instinct Kurds apply to fruit, herbs, and cheese. It remains a beloved seasonal food in the Wan and Bitlis region.
Conclusion
Darex is the one-hundred-and-eighth article in this series, and the first to come not from a field, a pasture, or an orchard, but from the water. It is a fish that should not exist — a creature thriving in a lake that kills almost everything else — and the Kurdish villages of Gola Wanê have built a small, seasonal cuisine around its impossible abundance: frying it fresh in spring, salting it down for winter, gathering each year to watch it leap the rapids. In that, the darex is the whole logic of Kurdish food in miniature: take what a hard land improbably offers, eat it gratefully now, and keep the rest against the cold. One hundred and eight articles in, the pearl mullet of Lake Wan stands for the truth that even the strangest, saltiest corner of Kurdistan still sets a table — and that the jewel of this lake, by every name it carries, has a Kurdish one.
References and Further Reading
Rudaw — Van’s endemic pearl mullet: the fish of the Kurdish province that survives the soda lake
Offbeat Travel — Pearl mullet of Lake Van: migration and how it is cooked (tava and grilled)
Kurdish-History.com — Penîrê Giyayî: the herbed cheese of the same Wan lakeshore
Kurdish-History.com — Hingiv: the mountain ecology of the Wan region in another Kurdish food