Day Trip to Beyşehir: The 1299 Wooden Eşrefoğlu Mosque and Eflatunpınar Hittite Pool

Ninety kilometres south-west of Konya over the forested Taurus foothills (1 hour 15 minutes by car or hourly minibus from Konya Otogar), the landscape opens onto Lake Beyşehir (Beyşehir Gölü), Turkey's largest freshwater lake, ringed by 3,000-metre snow-capped mountains and dotted with thirty-three islands. On its south-eastern shore stands a masterpiece of medieval timber architecture inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2023 (as part of the "Wooden Hypostyle Mosques of Medieval Anatolia"), paired nearby with a 3,200-year-old Hittite sacred spring.

1. The UNESCO-Listed Eşrefoğlu Mosque (Built 1296 to 1299)

Built by Süleyman Bey, ruler of the Eşrefoğlu Principality, as the centrepiece of a lakeside complex that includes a covered stone bazaar (bedesten), bathhouse and octagonal tiled tomb, the Eşrefoğlu Mosque is the largest and best-preserved wooden-columned and wooden-roofed mosque in the Islamic world:

• 48 Cedar Columns Cured in Lake Water: before stepping inside, you enter through a soaring 10-metre carved stone portal. Inside the vast prayer hall stand forty-eight towering columns of Taurus cedar wood topped with hand-carved wooden stalactite (muqarnas) capitals and painted beams. According to historical tradition, the cedar logs were soaked at the bottom of Lake Beyşehir for six months before construction so they would never dry out and crack.
• The Central Snow Pit (Karlık): right in the middle of the wooden columns beneath an open roof skylight sits a deep stone-lined pit called the karlık. In winter and spring, snow from the roof was shovelled into this pit; as the snow slowly melted and evaporated through the summer, it kept the microclimate inside the mosque at a constant humidity so the 725-year-old cedar columns and walnut minbar never split.
• The 6-Metre Turquoise Tiled Mihrab: covering the entire southern wall is a dazzling mosaic-tile prayer niche in turquoise and eggplant purple.

2. The 1914 Ottoman Stone Regulator Bridge (Taşköprü) & Eflatunpınar Hittite Monument

Walk five minutes from the mosque to the lake outlet to cross the 15-arch 1914 Ottoman Taşköprü, then drive 20 minutes north of Beyşehir to Eflatunpınar ("Plato's Spring"). Built around 1250 BC during the Hittite Empire under King Tudhaliya IV, a crystal-clear natural spring pool is dammed by a monumental wall of fourteen carved trachyte blocks depicting the Hittite Storm God, the Sun Goddess of Arinna, winged solar discs and mountain bull-men holding up the heavens right at the water's edge.