Lake Carles

Lake Carles (Savamese lac Carles, derived from Sabamic caeruleus or cerulean, dark blue) is a major lake in northern Messenia. Carles is the third-largest lake in Messenia after Lake Velic and Lake Bocha, but the second deepest after Bocha with a maximum depth of 367 metres. The lake’s main in- and outflow is the Gaste river, with the Upper Gaste, which rises in the western Aphrasian mountains, entering the lake at Pont d’Chélîn, and the Lower Gaste beginning below Maconfle as it flows north and east towards the Arcedian Sea. It forms the westernmost piece of the Great Ice Lake that extended through the Twin Lakes to the Great Lakes, 900 kilometres to the east, along the edge of the Benovian Ice Sheet during the last Glacial Maximum.

The lake lies at the centre of the historic Cairan Heartland (which is sometimes called Cerulea for the lake), and borders on Savam and, since the excision of those states after the Embute War in 1893, Brex-Sarre and Emilia. In deeper historical times it was the centrepoint of early Sabāmani civilisation, with Laporum, the capital of the First Sabāmani Empire, on its southern shore in modern-day Sarre. Later, it was entirely surrounded by the territory of the Arganite States, and for this it is referred to in some more poetical Cairan works of the period as la piscine d’accouchement, “the birthing pool”.