History of Lake Urmia

The lake is named after the provincial capital city of Urmia, originally a Syriac name meaning city of water. In the early 1930s, it was called Lake Rezaiyeh after Reza Shah Pahlavi, but after the Iranian Revolution in the late 1970s, the lake was renamed 'Urmia'. Its ancient Persian name was Chichast (meaning, "glittering"–a reference to the glittering mineral particles suspended in the lake water and found along its shores). In the medieval times it came to be known as Lake Kabuda, or "azure", in Persian.

Lake Urmia is home to some 212 species of