Ok, I hope this isn’t too different from what Dilik told me:

There were three poor men who had gone out looking for food. They happened to find a big lid buried in the sand. When they opened it, they found a well with jars of honey inside. The well was deep–too deep for them to reach the last jar at the bottom. One of them went down to get it–and the other two closed the lid, shutting him in there, taking the honey for themselves.

Down inside the well, the frightened man felt around in the dark and found a passageway. It led to an underground world, a strange and beautiful other realm. Presiding over this place was a royal being: half woman, half snake. He knew she must be the Shahmaran, queen of snakes. Many people had tried to find her, for she had the knowledge of medicinal plants and could cure all kinds of sickness. Long ago, she had trusted men, but they had betrayed her, and now she stayed in hiding.
‘I must kill you,’ said the Shahmaran, ‘otherwise you will tell others that I am here.’
He begged her to spare his life. She relented, and he stayed there with her. The two of them fell in love. In time, however, he missed his family and asked to be allowed to return home to visit them. The Shahmaran agreed, but said, ‘Don’t go to the hammam. Because you have seen me, your skin will turn to scales if it gets wet. Then people will know, and compel you to tell them where I am.’
The man agreed, and took his leave.

It happened that at this time, the sultan was sick. No doctor could cure him. He told his vizier to find the Shahmaran. The vizier, knowing that the skin of anyone who had seen the Shahmaran would become scaly if it came in contact with water, had all the people rounded up, in every city and town and village, and doused with water. In this way, the vizier found the man who had seen the Shahmaran.
To begin with he would say nothing, but under torture he finally revealed the location of the well in the sand.
The Shahmaran was captured and brought before the ailing sultan and the vizier.
‘The only cure for your majesty’s illness,’ she said, ‘is to drink a broth made from my body.’
Then she spoke to her human lover. ‘The broth will grant immortality,’ she said. ‘Because I love you, I want you to drink it. But be careful. You must only consume that made from the human half, which is the life-giving part. The snake half is poisonous.’
The sultan’s soldiers killed the Shahmaran and the broth was made. The man was so ashamed and grief-stricken that he drank the part made from the snake, because he wanted to die for having caused the Shahmaran’s death. The sultan drank the part made from her human half.
But the Shahmaran had lied. She had known that the man would feel this way and drink the broth to kill himself. The poison was in her human half, and the snake half contained the gift of immortality. The sultan died a horrible death, and the man acquired immortal life. As a final boon, he also gained all the Shahmaran’s knowledge of medicine, and was able to become a great doctor and share his knoweldge with others.

To this day, snakes believe the Shahmaran will come back. It’s a good idea to keep a picture of the Shahmaran in your house so that snakes will know you respect her. Moreover, a snake will sometimes fall in love with a woman who has beautiul dark eyes, thinking that she is the Shahmaran, and follow her around.

This is principally a Kurdish legend, although it is also known and told amongst other cultures in the region. I thought it was fascinating. I have to side with the snakes: I don’t think a being like her could possibly be dead. After all, immortality is an ages-old magical power of snakes: surely their queen possesses it in a high degree.
To me, as a modern feminist, the story suggested an allegory of a society where women’s botanical and medical knowledge was respected changing to a more patriarchal one where scholarship and doctoring became male preserves - but that’s just my take on it. I also couldn’t help thinking of near-eastern snake cults, and the grandmother of all serpents, the Babylonian Tiamat. And, of course, Medusa, whose name means ’soverign female wisdom’.

Here’s another traveller’s impression of Shahmaran.

As it turned out, I didn’t buy a picture. I’d already drawn one of my own, the night before, and I figure the Shahmaran won’t mind helping me draw a better one. Whatever the actual origins of the story, I felt that I’d been touched by something well and truly alive.

I shouldn’t neglect to mention the other interesting creature I met that day - the dog of the household, a pure white female, part husky, with one brown eye and one ice blue - truly an otherworldly animal. I’ve stupidly forgotten her name in Turkish, but it meant ‘rice’. (Pilaf? It definitely started with a ‘P’.) Funnily enough, I’d dreamed about David Bowie the night before.