Bafa Lake Articles

Bafa Lake Articles

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TURKEY KEEPS A FOOT FIRMLY IN THE PAST

Sunday Telegraph, 9th May, 2010

The traditional hospitality of the village pansiyon ensures the old values are not lost amid the new, says Jeremy Seal

Deserted?  Not quite.  On the beach at Kapikiri a single donkey tottered beneath the combined weight of a shawled villager and the stack of firewood she had scavenged.  Otherwise, there was nothing but faded blue fishing dinghies, high-prowed like pistachio shells, drawn up on the fine, ivory-coloured sand.  And cormorants returning to their roosts among the island ruins of Lake Bafa’s Byzantine citadels and basilicas.  So much for sun loungers and banana boats; so much, even for sunbathers.

According to some operators, mass defections last summer from the over-priced Eurozone established Turkey as Britain’s most popular package destination.  If this sounded like good news among those looking for the value fly’n’flop experience, then it inevitably rang alarm bells among those who have watched the recent transformation of formerly picturesque fishing villages like Kalkan and Didim into sprawling resorts like Olu Deniz and Marmaris.  Might the authentic charms of the land which gave us western philosophy, Homer and Herodotus be about to disappear beneath a sea of concrete?  Was mass-market success in real danger of standardising the Turkish tourism experience?

Not at Kapikiri.  A recent visit reminded me just how rich Turkey remains when it comes to age-old travelling draws like rural tradition, landscape, wildlife and history, starting with this lakeside village 20 miles inland from the Aegean coast near Kusadasi.  Set at the foot of the Besparmak Range (ancient Mount Latmos), and blessed with abundant birdlife, mythical association and memorable hiking, this comparatively remote place does not attract visitors so much as devotees.  And only in manageable handfuls.  The region is a natural park, but one littered with ruins from every age; Kapikiri itself squats to spectacular effect bang in the middle of classical Heracleia’s magnificent defensive walls, its temples, theatre and baths.  While Turkey’s bureaucrats have long made it their business to remove contemporary settlers from many of the country’s ancient city sites, they have for some reason left the people of Kapikiri largely to themselves.  Advisedly, for the casual customisation of the place, with fluted column stubs serving as garden tables and the level agora housing the village football pitch, only adds to the allure.  The few information signs are rusty or have been hand-scrawled by villagers hoping that a view of the engraved marble slabs strewn across their kitchen gardens may persuade visitors to take a second look at the bracelets they are hawking.  The man at the newly erected booth readily suggests excuses why visitors need not to buy his site tickets; mine apparently was the fact that I was staying in the village.

Kapikiri, in keeping with such a spirit, does not run to hotels.  It instead does an excellent line in the traditional village pansiyon.  The European equivalent in its various forms, French pension or Italian pensione among them, may have had its time, recalling post-war stays in dodgy continental boarding houses.  The Turkish version at its best, however, showcases the national genius for unadorned and inexpensive family-run accommodation, with home cooking and exceptional hospitality thrown in.  It happens that several of Kapikiri’s pansiyons (see box) are very good indeed.

I found the Kaya Pansiyons shaded gardens and simple stone cabins on a rocky bluff above the beach.  Muammer Cakir, a congenial Kapikiri native, ran the place with the help of various members of his extended family.  The pansiyon is now run by brother Giray Cakir.  I had barely told Muammer that I was keen to explore the mountains before he had sorted me out with a hiking guide – his brother Mehmet, who knew the area as well as anybody – for the following day.

‘You could take a look at the Royal Road before dark,’ he urged.  Across hillsides strewn with mysterious rocky outcrops, smooth as eggs and high as houses, I followed Muammer’s directions to arrive at a pavement of boulders, its giant cobbles perfectly aligned, which wound into the mountains.  Little was known of this remarkable road’s origins; they were, however, presumed so ancient that local herdsmen, villagers making for their hillside olive groves and entranced hikers alike now walked where the armies of Xerxes and Alexander may once have passed.  Back at the pansiyon Muammer’s nephew delivered a dish of baked aubergine, minced lamb and garlic to my table above the darkening lake.

I was up early the next morning to join Mehmet on a hike through olive groves and orchid meadows to hidden caves daubed with 8,000-year-old, rust-red paintings.  Later, we reached the crumbling walls of the Byzantine monastery at Yediler, its rock overhangs covered with richly detailed frescoes, and broke out the picnic of bread, cheese, huge tomatoes and olives, all local, which the pansiyon had provided.   It was late by the time we got back to the village.  Sun-silvered lizards scurried around the rock-hewn temple to Endymion, a shepherd so beautiful that the moon goddess had slipped him some divine Rohypnol before carting the stupefied youth off to a cave high on Mount Latmos, there to forever make babies with him.

Pansiyon life proved cheap, charming and individual; so I duly made for another one, the Kilisealti, or The Pansiyon Beneath the Church, in the hilltop town of Sirince south of Izmir.  There were tangerine trees in the pansiyon gardens and excellent views of the town’s striking timber and stucco houses where Ottoman Christians had lived until their expulsion from Turkey in the 1920s.  Sirince’s appealing architecture and its proximity to Ephesus, the country’s foremost visitor site, has put the town firmly on the map.  For much of the day the shaded lanes became something of a tat-mart – soaps, laces, wine – ringing with the Babel utterances of visiting coachloads.  But in the evening the dust settled.  Farmers’ carts creaked along the lanes and only swallows stirred the air in the empty shell of St Demetrios Church.  In the morning, sitting in the pansiyon garden over an exceptional breakfast – homemade jams, cheese-filled filo pastries, a chilli dip called ezme, the juice of oranges plucked from the village trees – I appreciated Turkey’s pansiyons not only for their comparative value but for the sense they seemed to generate; a sense, rare in most hotels, of belonging, in the pansiyon but also in Turkey at large.

 Click to view the Telegraph’s online version

 

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HOW VERY CIVILISED

Conde Nast Traveller, April 2011

Although south-west Turkey is now firmly on the tourist map, its picturesque landscape still harbours secret beaches, great archaeological sites and relaxed, backcountry delights which never draw a crowd.

Ahmet Gonul, grizzled proprietor of the Oracle Pansiyon, was telling me how his people had fetched up in Didim. Ahmet died in 2013.  His parents, caught up in the geo-political upheavals of the 1920s, were among many thousands of Muslims ordered to leave their homes in Greece for new ones in Turkey. The town which the couple, travelling by cart, freighter and camel, finally reached was wholly abandoned; Didim’s Christian population, exiled in the same exchange of minorities, had lately set out on the Gonul’s journey in reverse. The new arrivals had their pick of the houses, choosing one hard by the heap of old stones in the centre of town where they set about making Turks of themselves.

‘I was born in this same house within a year,’ said Ahmet. He gestured at the pansiyon terrace where we were sitting among a casual scatter of old marble fragments, drinking glasses of black tea. ‘And I have lived here ever since.’

It was a stirring tale, and an illustrative one. Within the span of one lifetime – lived at one address – Turkey has gone from place of exile to holiday hot-spot, in Ahmet Gonul’s adopted neighbourhood as well as elsewhere along much of the country’s captivatingly beautiful southwestern littoral.  Turkey’s tourism boom meant that carts and camels played no part in my own journey to Didim.  Instead I took a direct flight to Bodrum, one of four airports now serving a region stretching from Izmir to Antalya (Ionia, Caria and Lycia to the ancients), where I picked up a hire car.   Lowering the windows to the scent of laurel and oregano, I was at Didim in barely an hour.

Which was where I tore up the script by checking into a place which had no prospect of featuring in any holiday glossy.  My room at the Oracle was shabby. My bed was basic. The floor was of concrete and the errant showerhead, which had soaked and stained the sagging bathroom ceiling, made washing a challenge.  I loved the place to bits.

To explain; the stirring reach of the old man’s migration story, and the Oracle’s epic credentials, certainly appealed, as did the convivial family atmosphere and the courteous management of Ahmet’s son Mahmut. The clincher, however, was that my room – Number Two – had surely the most immediate and uninterrupted ‘ruin’ view in all of Turkey. Just thirty yards beyond my window three columns rose to their full height – a pair still supported a section of architrave on their scrolled Ionic capitols – from the walled platform of a remarkable monument.

For Ahmet’s parents had happened to end up beside one of the glories of the Greco-Roman world: ‘By the Apollo Temple, Didyma’, to quote the pansiyon’s covetable postal address. The pansiyon’s name, meanwhile, was a reminder of Didyma’s ancient significance; the temple, second only to Delphi, dealt in prophetic utterances which guided men to fortune or folly. Didyma’s oracle attracted prominent clients, none more so than the last word in rich himself, King Croesus of neighbouring Lydia, who lavished offerings there amounting to two cubic metres of gold; but it also made implacable enemies.  The temple, habitually sacked, was rebuilt from around 300BC, and on such a scale that the work was to continue for five centuries without ever being signed off.  I wandered beside half-height columns visibly scored with the outlines of uncarved flutings, and among ones which earthquakes had long since toppled like surrendered stacks of casino chips. If I slept poorly at the Oracle, it was not so much the bumpy bed as that privileged window which kept me awake; moonlit marble, the call of owls and the various thoughts I had there – not least that every age has been decidedly kind to its risk analysts. Uncomfortable? Enthralled, more like. Amazed, besides, that I was the pansiyon’s only guest.

Everybody else was staying, it seemed, beyond Didim’s protected temple area; in the concrete sprawl of ‘apart hotels’, shopping malls and villa developments there, a depressing repetition of the same planning free-for-all which long since did for places like Kusadasi and Marmaris, Hisaronu and Ovacik, and even now was threatening to disfigure famously picturesque Bodrum.  Southwest Turkey, home to Homer, Herodotus and Heraclitus, may be heir to an immense cultural fortune – but in a currency considered rather less convertible, it can seem, than that readily wrung from beer bars, banana boats and sun loungers.

My sole occupancy of the Oracle might have confirmed mass tourism’s  armlock, but my happy time there also demonstrated how its hold might be broken. Southwest Turkey’s prodigal roster of classical and Byzantine ruin sites, and its pristine landscapes, secret beaches included, which the widely travelled Freya Stark judged the most beautiful of all, even now remain within reach; for those, that is, ready to compromise on comfort – ‘romantic slumming’, to give it a more palatable gloss – and to look beyond the brochures.

It was a prescription which led me straight to nearby Kapikiri. Outside Didim they were widening the main highway, as if the only conceivable compass bearings were north to Kusadasi or south to Bodrum. I headed east. A country lane wound between the boulder-strewn slopes of the Besparmak (Five Finger) Mountains and the white sand shores of Lake Bafa. The area had been designated a ‘Nature Park’, bubble-wrapping it against the least development. Any signs of settlement were so old – ashlar city walls, temples and shoreside necropolises, all firmly BC – that I sensed an upgrade in the offing; from a stay beside the ruins to one among them, just as my Kapikiri pansiyon was about to prove. I was booked at a place called the Agora, never imagining that a name I’d figured loosely allusive – in the way of West End tavernas called the Acropolis – was effectively an address. For it was by the agora, ancient Heracleia’s market place, that it thrilled me to find the Agora.

The Turkish authorities, in thrall to the museum tendency, have in recent decades cleared the semi-nomadic villagers and subsistence farmers from their settlements in major classical sites such as Aphrodisias and Labranda; but rustic Kapikiri, Tramp to Hellenistic Heracleia’s Lady, has been largely been left to continue the cohabitation, and to alluringly picturesque effect.  On every side the villagers had casually customised the past; the column drums which doubled as garden tables, and the city walls, once secure bastions against sack, which in their dotage were now expected to do no more than contain the local milk cows.  Across the bouleterion, or council chamber, a line of washing had been strung.  Goal posts stood on the dusty agora.

At the Agora, run by various members of the Sercin family, the atmosphere was at once expeditionary but congenial; timbered interiors, binoculars, and shelves stacked with bird books and maps, but also a well-appointed bar and an emphatically excellent kitchen, the whole suggestive less of a pansiyon – a term borrowed, after all, from the French – than an alpine auberge.  Various bedroom annexes, simple but spacious, were scattered among the flower-filled gardens.  Still more appealing were the nearby village houses – brick-built, one square room above the other – which the Sercins had recently converted into imaginative duplexes, each one a light-filled bedroom with bathroom en bas.  Mine was directly below the village mosque which would have meant an early awakening, when the mountains were hessian in the soft light, if Kapikiri’s cockerels and the donkeys had not beaten the village muezzin to it.

‘It’s for the mountains that people come,’ explained Mithat Sercin. ‘And for the ruins, the birds, the spring flowers and the lake.  But mostly for the hiking.’  In the days that followed Mithat was my guide to these scarcely credible landscapes, home to the mythical Endymion whom the moon goddess had multiply seduced in his eternal sleep; his temple stands, unsigned, by the lane into the village.  Through a maze of giant boulders which the elements had weathered to elusively suggestive shapes, like Rorschach patterns, young Mithat led me by meadows and stands of buddleia to Neolithic cave paintings and to frescoes crumbling in the vaults of abandoned monasteries.  An ancient highway which the local people knew as Kral Yolu (Royal Road), and which nobody else knew of at all, was fashioned from boulders big as tea chests. This causeway of giant cobbles, which ran for miles across the mountain, the villagers even today followed by donkey to reach their olive groves.

There were geese and village children on the white strand directly below Kapikiri.  For the lake’s stand-out beach, however, I had Abdullah run me in his faded blue fishing boat across the water to Ikiz Ada.   A deserted crescent of crushed shells, shaded by tamarisks, ran out to a headland topped by crumbling Byzantine castellations.  The water was clear but brackish, preserving a memory of ancient times when the lake had been an arm of the Aegean and Heracleia a bustling port; which was worse news for Heracleia, condemned to its land-locked decline, than it apparently was for Abdullah.

‘I land carp and other lake species,’ the fisherman explained, pointing at his net.  ‘But I also catch sea fish here.’  I ate one of Abdullah’s bass with home-baked bread and home-pressed olive oil, and a dill and potato salad, on my last evening at the Agora.

The road south led to Olu Deniz, a famously photogenic lagoon beach now jostled by apartment blocks, where I took the spiralling cliff road to Faralya.  Beyond the village a rutted track plunged into the forest. At the end there stood a secret, seaside camp.  Raised wooden cabins, hammocks and cushion-strewn divans were scattered across grounds composed in unequal parts of luxuriant jungle and formal parterre, of orchard and a kitchen garden brimming with aubergines, peppers and tomatoes. The camp – Beyaz Yunus Faralya – had kayaks; the following morning I paddled to nearby Kabak where an appealing counter-culture – yurts, yoga platforms and hand-painted pieces of driftwood offering incenses, herbal teas and bracelets – was in full swing.  The beach was a blissful place; the sand pristine but for the makeshift wooden frames which some thoughtful soul had lately erected around the buried egg clutches of rare loggerhead turtles.

Out of Faralya an unmade road hairpinned wildly over the high shoulder of Babadag Mountain.  I came down through the dust to the hamlet at Dodurgan and parked by the mosque where the village imam, Ozcan, volunteered to guide me through the ruins of Sidyma.  Nobles’ sarcophagae with coffered ceilings and carved lions’ heads stood islanded in fields of harvested wheat, a fuzz of stubble washing around plinths patterned by scurrying lizards.  A pedestal was topped with the ghostly imprint of some lost statue’s feet.  We retraced our steps to the mosque, its walls partially raised from marble blocks inscribed in ancient Greek, where Ozcan went off to call the village’s old men to prayer, but not before he had called his wife to bring me lunch. Beneath the trees, where the imam’s daughter was at her home-made loom working red chevrons and diamonds into the patterns of an ornamental runner rug, I ate the fresh country food at which Turks excel; aubergines with rice and a rocket salad soused in lemon juice, and water melon.  Ozcan had no idea what he should properly charge; haggling him upwards to an acceptable minimum, 10 lira (£4), proved hard work.

Memorable back-country days, then, but ones which had combined to land the odd punch on this wearying traveller; and I will not pretend that I had strayed into the gravitational field of the Turkish Mediterranean’s outstanding small hotel entirely by accident.   By the time I reached the Villa Mahal, Kalkan, I was craving the kind of comforts which I had largely foregone in Anatolia’s picturesque but primitive hinterland; all-white bedrooms awash with sea light, hillsides hung with tumbling hibiscus and a terraced swimming pool, and lavish rooftop breakfast buffets where I discovered persimmons.  Stepped paths descended through lemon trees to the sea where there was swimming, spa facilities, and lounging; and superb starlit dining, washed down by the odd glass from Turkey’s rapidly improving wine list – a Sauvignon Blanc called Egeo stood out – where I surreptitiously surveyed my fellow guests and placed private bets on which of them might take the Agora, even the Oracle, in their stride.

The Mahal proved a powerful restorative.  In the cool of the morning I beat even the ticket officer to riverside Xanthos, Lycia’s ancient capital; but that I had these blissful ruins all to myself was something I was learning to take for granted in Turkey.  The monolithic pillar tombs, faced by moulded replicas of the exquisite friezes lost to the British Museum in the nineteenth century, evidenced the influence of Persia while the vast mosaic which extended across the floor of the Byzantine basilica was firmly in the Greco-Roman tradition; reminders of the cultural tug of war that had always characterised this land.  I was leaving this World Heritage Site as the ticket officer showed up, and with a good book to keep him occupied, always an indication of just how few tickets – at 3 lira (£1.20) each – he expected to sell that day.

‘Eighty, if I’m lucky,’ he told me resignedly.  ‘Everybody’s on the beach.’  Which made holiday sense, not least because one of the Mediterranean’s great pristine strands, twelve uninterrupted miles of the finest sand, happened to lie just south of Xanthos.  At the eastern end, where the main access road ran past the ruins at Patara, there were serried ranks of loungers, sun umbrellas and an industrialised bar service.  At the other end there was Karadere.

At Karadere they clearly dreamed of the crowds that Patara drew.  That much they had signalled by building a changing facility beside the shaded café, with a smart sign, in a sort of English, identifying it as the ‘Umbressing Room’.  The only other buildings at Karadere were a few riverside cabins, with vegetable plots and driftwood decks where local men in singlets cast for fish alongside young sons.   By a wooden footbridge, gated against trespassing goats, I slipped into the clear river and let the flow carry me downstream until I met the surf.  At the beach there were two old men.  This pair, foregoing the umbressing room, had hung their clothes on their walking sticks which they had planted upright in the sand.  They now sat in grubby underpants, contentedly caking themselves with wet sand.  Beyond them the beach stretched vast and empty in the direction of Patara.

My final ruin stood barely an hour from the airport at Dalaman.  The road that wound into the hills above Fethiye emerged among the olive groves and pine woods of the Kaya Valley.  Across the valley’s southern slopes Levissi appeared derelict and grey.  Unlike the sites I had come to know, however, all fallen columns, tiered theatre steps, and scattered sarcophagae, Levissi was largely composed of houses barely earlier than the mid-Victorian one where I lived in England.  The roofs were gone, though, and fig trees grew from the rubble-strewn interiors where cerulean-blue plaster clung to crumbling hearths.  Tortoises grazed in the grassy lanes, and martins swooped through the vaulted shells of the town’s two basilicas.  Levissi was a reminder that Turkey’s history was not all ancient; for this had been a town of Christians, expelled forever in the same exchanges which had brought Ahmet Gonul’s parents to Didim.  I had come full circle, and it was time to go home, knowing that I at least was free to return.

 Click to view Conde Nast Traveller’s online version.

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