Yaren the Stork and the Village That Waits Each Spring

Q: Where is the stork village in Türkiye?

The stork village is Eskikaraağaç, a village on a peninsula in Lake Uluabat in the Karacabey district of Bursa. In 2011 it was named a European Stork Village by EuroNatur.

Q: Is the 1934 eagle and stork war real?

It is a widely retold story from the summer of 1934, set near Bursa. Newspapers of the time carried versions of it, but the details vary, and historians treat it as popular legend rather than confirmed fact.

Seda
4 days ago
10 min read

A watercolor-style illustration of fisherman Adem Yılmaz standing in his boat with the white stork Yaren beside him on Lake Uluabat, with the village of Eskikaraağaç and a stork nest visible in the background.

Every February, a small village on the shore of Lake Uluabat begins to watch the sky.

The people of Eskikaraağaç, near Karacabey in the province of Bursa, are waiting for one white stork named Yaren. For fifteen springs, Yaren has returned to the same nest above the same village, and in most years has glided down to the wooden boat of the same fisherman, Adem Yılmaz, who has fed the bird by hand since the early 2010s. In 2026 Yaren arrived on the 24th of February, the earliest date yet recorded for this return. By then much of the country was already asking the question the village asks every year, whether Yaren had come back.

The arrival is rarely simple. When the bird first landed that year, Adem mistook it for Nazlı, Yaren's mate, because it looked thinner and smaller than he remembered. For two or three days the village stayed uncertain. Wind and rain had kept the storks flying low, and from a distance one white stork looks much like another. Then the bird left the nest, circled once, and settled onto Adem's boat. That descent to the boat is the only proof anyone trusts, and when it came, an old man's worry turned to relief in front of the cameras.

A village on the water

Eskikaraağaç sits on a low peninsula that reaches into Lake Uluabat, a shallow freshwater lake west of Bursa whose deepest point is about three meters. The lake is a Ramsar wetland of international importance, holds the most extensive white water lily beds in Türkiye, and is a breeding ground for the endangered pygmy cormorant. Its older name is Apolyont, from the ancient town of Apollonia, whose site is the nearby village of Gölyazı.

The village carries an older history of its own. Until the population exchange of 1923, it was largely a Greek settlement, and after the exchange, families arriving from Greece resettled it. Today it is known by a second name, Leylek Köyü, the Stork Village.

In 2011 EuroNatur, the European foundation that coordinates the European Stork Villages Network, named Eskikaraağaç a European Stork Village, the only one in Türkiye. The village has a bird observation tower, a small nature museum, and a women's cooperative, and from March until late summer it fills with storks on the rooftops and the tops of old trees.

How the friendship began

Adem Yılmaz has fished Lake Uluabat for most of his life. Sometime in the early 2010s, a white stork dropped onto his boat while he was working the water, and he began offering it fish by hand. The following spring the bird came back to the same nest and the same boat, and it has done so every year since. The wildlife photographer Alper Tüydeş started documenting the pair around 2016, and his images carried the story into national and then international news. A documentary followed in 2019, and in 2024 the story reached cinema screens.

Storks in the village are fitted with numbered leg rings during official surveys, which is how a single returning bird can be tracked across many years. In practice, though, recognition usually comes down to behavior. Yaren is the bird that returns to one particular nest and lands on one particular boat. The 2026 mix-up with Nazlı is a reminder of how thin that line of recognition can be.

What it means to wait for Yaren

By now the waiting reaches far past the village. Yaren's nest can be watched around the clock through live cameras at yarenleylek.com, so people who have never set foot in Bursa follow the season day by day. Each February and March, national outlets report whether Yaren has arrived, and the news travels within hours. When the bird is late, Adem grows visibly anxious, standing at the water's edge and scanning the sky, afraid that something has gone wrong on the long road south. He has spoken of sleepless nights and of mistaking other storks for the one he is waiting for. When Yaren finally lands on his boat, the relief shows plainly on his face, and the village seems to exhale with him.

In May the village holds a Stork Festival that draws thousands of visitors, and a quiet fishing settlement has become a place families travel to see. The local authorities have noticed. The Bursa municipality has announced plans to develop the village, and in 2026 Karacabey was put forward to host an international meeting of the European Stork Villages Network in 2028. One bird has changed how an entire district sees itself.

Yaren's chicks

Each summer Yaren and Nazlı raise their young in the nest above the village. Adem Yılmaz has said that they usually raise three or four chicks in a year. Through the warm months the parents take turns carrying food back to the nest, and the small heads grow until they rise above the rim. About fifteen days after the young have found their wings and lifted off on their own, Yaren and the mate set off south, and the nest stays empty until the next spring.

The wider biology fits this rhythm. A white stork pair usually lays three to five eggs, which both parents incubate for thirty-three to thirty-four days. White storks do not begin breeding until they are three to five years old. The chicks that leave Eskikaraağaç each year spend those early years far from the nest before they return as parents. They can ride thermals within days of fledging, which is what lets them make that first long migration on their own. They carry the bloodline forward without inheriting the name.

The stork in Turkish language and belief

In Türkiye the white stork has long been read as the herald of spring, the bird whose return marks the end of winter and, in some regions, the approach of Nevruz. A stork that builds its nest on a roof is taken as a sign of abundance, and harming a stork or its nest is widely believed to bring misfortune, so the nests are left undisturbed.

The bird also entered the language. Storks are sometimes called hacı leylek, the pilgrim stork, from an old folk belief that their migration carries them over Mecca, so that they earn a kind of pilgrimage twice a year. And there is the idiom leyleği havada görmek, "to see the stork in the air," said of someone who is always traveling and never stays in one place. It belongs to a wider body of Turkish idioms in which a piece of everyday observation hardens into a fixed expression. The familiar idea that a stork brings babies to the home sits here too, a belief shared across many countries and carried into children's books.

When the country took the storks' side

The affection has a long memory, and it surfaces in one of the stranger stories Türkiye tells about its birds. In the summer of 1934, in the countryside around Orhangazi near Bursa, eagles were said to have attacked a stork's nest and killed the young. In the weeks that followed, the story goes, storks gathered in great numbers and fought the eagles across a stretch of country reaching toward Thrace and the Aegean. The account is usually traced to a dispatch that reached the foreign press in August 1934. What gives the tale its warmth is the human part. Villagers are said to have taken the storks' side, some of them firing on the eagles to defend the birds they loved.

Contemporary newspapers appear to have reported versions of the story, although historians today generally treat the episode as popular legend rather than verified history.

The details should be held lightly. The casualty figures change from one telling to the next. What is real is the impulse the story preserves. When people imagined a battle in the sky, they placed themselves on the side of the stork. That instinct, to stand with the gentle migratory bird that returns each spring, is the same one that now keeps a village watching the road for Yaren.

Gurabahane-i Laklakan: an older kind of care

This way of treating animals as part of the household of a place has deep roots. In nineteenth-century Bursa, in the cobblers' section of the covered market near the Irgandı Bridge, there was a small institution the people called Gurabahane-i Laklakan, the home for destitute storks. Injured and aging storks that had fallen behind the migration, along with other birds, were kept and fed there on the charity of the market's tradesmen. The poet Ahmet Haşim visited the place and wrote an essay of the same name, describing a square in the market where wounded storks and old crows lived on what passers-by gave them. The restored building today houses an animal care center, holding on to the memory of the older institution if not its unbroken continuity.

That shelter was one expression of a much older habit. Ottoman charitable foundations, the vakıf, supported animals as well as people. Birds were given houses, kuş evleri, carved into the high walls of mosques and homes, some of them shaped like little palaces with balconies and domes, set where cats could not reach and the wind could not strike.

Historical records describe endowments that funded daily food for animals: a foundation by Koca Mustafa Paşa in Istanbul, for instance, set aside daily liver for the cats of the Şeyh Evhaddeddin lodge. Other endowments paid for grain and meat to be carried out in winter to the birds and to the wolves that hunger drove down from the mountains. In İzmir's Ödemiş, one foundation set aside income to feed storks that had fallen behind their flocks near the New Mosque.

European travellers wrote about all this with a kind of astonishment, Lamartine among them. The Prussian officer Helmuth von Moltke, writing his letters from the country in the nineteenth century, described a refuge for cats in Üsküdar and pigeons cared for in the courtyard of the Bayezid Mosque, and he noticed that some old gravestones had been hollowed at the top so that rainwater would gather there for dogs and birds to drink.

The dead were enlisted, in their quiet way, to water the living. There was even a gentle custom, noted by the traveller Evliya Çelebi, of buying caged birds at the market simply to set them free. All of this belongs to the same literary heritage that still shapes how Turkish carries its history.

A habit that never left

Walk through Istanbul today and most of this is still in plain sight. People buy paper cones of seed to scatter for the pigeons in the courtyard of the New Mosque at Eminönü and around Bayezid, almost exactly where Moltke watched them being fed nearly two centuries ago.

The city's street cats sleep in shop windows and on warm car bonnets, fed at doorways by people who would never call them strays, and the dogs that doze outside bakeries are known and named by whole neighborhoods.

A visitor who spends a week in Türkiye usually leaves with at least one photograph of a cat asleep somewhere it should not be. Yaren and Adem are the famous version of something very ordinary here.

Why one bird matters

There is an honest question inside this story. A wild stork that returns to a fisherman's boat is also returning to an easy source of fish, and storks are strongly faithful to old nest sites. The bond has a practical foundation, and the recognition is clear on the human side and uncertain on the bird's. Those practical details do not make the story smaller. They simply help explain why it has endured for so many years.

What Yaren has done for Lake Uluabat is something that years of official reports could not. The bird turned a fragile wetland into a place people feel attached to. The lake faces the pressures common to wetlands, from shifting water levels to the dangers storks meet along the eastern migration route, where power lines and poaching take a heavy toll. A single well-loved bird gives those wider concerns a face and a name.

When Yaren leaves at the end of summer, the village grows quiet and the cameras go still, and the waiting begins again before the leaves have turned. The story holds more than a fisherman and a bird. It holds a season, a wetland, a set of folk beliefs, and a handful of words that only open up once you know the bird standing behind them.

A language keeps the things its speakers have loved, and in Turkish the stork has been loved for a very long time. If you want to keep pulling that thread, it is worth seeing how everyday Turkish expressions carry cultural memory, one phrase at a time.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Q: Who is Yaren the stork?

A: Yaren is a white stork that returns each spring to the village of Eskikaraağaç on Lake Uluabat, near Karacabey in Bursa. The bird is known for landing on the boat of the fisherman Adem Yılmaz, who feeds it by hand.

Q: Where is the stork village in Türkiye?

A: It is Eskikaraağaç, a village on a peninsula in Lake Uluabat in the Karacabey district of Bursa. In 2011 it was named a European Stork Village by EuroNatur, the only one in Türkiye.

Q: How long have Adem and Yaren known each other?

A: The friendship dates to the early 2010s. In 2026 Yaren returned for the fifteenth year, arriving on the 24th of February.

Q: How many chicks does Yaren raise each year?

A: Adem Yılmaz has said that Yaren and Nazlı usually raise three or four chicks. White stork pairs usually lay three to five eggs, although the number of chicks successfully raised can vary from nest to nest.

Q: Is the 1934 eagle and stork war real?

A: It is a widely retold story from the summer of 1934, set in the countryside near Bursa, in which villagers sided with the storks against eagles. Newspapers of the time carried it, but the details vary between versions, and historians treat it as popular legend rather than confirmed fact.

Q: Why are storks important in Turkish culture?

A: Storks are seen as heralds of spring and signs of abundance. They appear in the idiom leyleği havada görmek, said of people who are always travelling, and in the folk name hacı leylek, the pilgrim stork. The wider tradition of caring for storks and other animals reaches back to Ottoman charitable foundations.

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