Lake Zarivar

Lake Zarivar, also written Zrebar or Zeribar, lies just west of the town of Marivan in the Zagros mountains of Kurdistan, close to the border with Iraq. It is a freshwater lake, a few kilometres long, fed by springs in its bed and surrounded by reed beds, oak-covered hills and the town's orchards. In Kurdish song and story it is a beloved place, and local legend says a city lies drowned beneath its waters.

For the people of Marivan the lake is part of daily life. Families picnic on its shores, fishermen work its waters, and boats take visitors out among the reeds, where herons, grebes and ducks nest. In autumn the oak hills turn bronze and the lake takes on their colour. The town holds events on the shore, and a path runs along part of the lake edge.

Zarivar has an importance far beyond Kurdistan. Because it has held water continuously for many thousands of years, layers of mud have settled on its bed season after season, trapping pollen from the plants that grew around it. In the 1960s scientists drilled cores from the lake bed and used the pollen to reconstruct how the vegetation and climate of the Zagros changed since the last ice age, showing among other things when oak woodland spread back into the mountains. The Zeribar record remains one of the reference sequences for the environmental history of the region where farming began.

The lake faces pressures from farming, development and changes in water, and local groups have campaigned for its protection. It remains the defining landscape of Marivan.