Bozcaada Articles

Bozcaada Articles

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SOMEWHERE FOR THE WEEKEND?

Conde Nast Traveller, July 2015

Like the juiciest Turkish pickle, this tiny,briny island is deliciously preserved.  After years being shut tight, the lid’s off and it’s time to take a bite.  By Jeremy Seal

On first inspection the cobbled lanes of Bozcaada looked gorgeous, with their rickety taverna tables and sprays of fragrant jasmine backed by the facades of nineteenth-century Greek townhouses, but they did pong of fermenting grapes.  The smell was powerful but it was one I approved of, as much for the end product as because more visited Aegean islands just didn’t smell like this any more.   Checking in could wait; I would begin my time on this intriguing Turkish island, one of just two in the Aegean among hundreds of Greek ones, by checking out this telling whiff which I had soon tracked through the little port town to a whitewashed warehouse, a perfect period piece topped by sagging tiles.  Beyond the splintered wooden gates, which stood ajar, I caught a thrilling glimpse of an earlier age: high tanks set in timber scaffold frames, rickety ladders nailed together, and one sweaty labourer pumping pressed red grapes into a bubbling tank via an arrhythmic generator which he regularly patted by way of encouragement.  With a wave he invited me into the winery, explaining that the juice was from a traditional island grape called Karalahna and would be ready for bottling in the best part of year.  The bad news was that there was not even a glass for me to test.  Clearly convinced that this was no way for a Turk to treat a guest, even an uninvited one, the labourer presented me with some apples which a friend had lately brought him from the mainland.

‘From Mount Ida,’ he added as casually if the sacred mountain south of ancient Troy were the local co-op.  I scoffed one of the apples on my way to the nearby Armagrandi Hotel, a converted winery, and it tasted very good indeed.

It was a fine start, apples and grapes respectively confirming that the native courtesies and traditional livelihoods are doing fine on little Bozcaada.  This island is much less familiar than neighbouring Greek ones like Lesbos, and for good reason; until the 1980s the Turkish authorities banned foreigners from visiting here.    Six-mile Bozcaada stands hard by an historic hot spot, the Dardanelles Strait, which explains why my ferry passed an anchored warship as my ferry made the half-hour crossing from the Turkish mainland.

The history of Bozcaada – or Tenedos, as earlier generations of Greeks knew it – begins with warships. The ancient Greeks brought the Trojan War to an end by hiding their battle fleet behind this island, breaking cover to do over nearby Troy once the locals had been so foolish as to drag the Wooden Horse inside the city’s walls.  This was a memorable start, though it did condemn Tenedos to a life lived on high alert.  Byzantines, Ottomans, Venetians and Greeks took turns at occupation, with even the French garrisoning this strategically vital island during the Gallipoli Campaign of 1915; with a record like this, it was little surprise that the Turks were keen to put off foreigners, not least by renaming Tenedos, in  translation from the Turkish, as Barren Island.

Few names, as I can now report, are so deeply misleading.  Beyond the crenellated castle overlooking the harbour there’s scant evidence of militarisation here.  Enforced isolation actually appears to have done the island a big favour.  During the decades that tourism was doing for the rest of the Aegean, with sponge fishermen chucking it in to stock sun cream or to build holiday developments, the people of Bozcaada were getting on with tending vineyards and catching fish.  The result is an island which is strikingly unspoiled, with one of the most drop-dead lovely Ottoman-Greek harbour towns in the Aegean, a vine-covered interior and a blissful selection of sand beaches, not forgetting the handful of family-run wineries; it’s even thick with small hotels imaginatively converted from period buildings such as wineries and school buildings, and without the usual Turkish recourse to concrete.  Bozcaada is where Turkey’s own island scene – individual, laid-back, elegant and consciously retro – has belatedly arrived.  After touring regional mainland highlights including Troy and the Gallipoli battlefields I was here for a few days in September, at the height of the grape harvest.

I freshened up at the Armagrandi – loft-style rooms open into the eaves and good gardens with over-sized wine barrels refashioned as cushion-strewn snugs – I set out to explore, dodging the tractor trailers busy delivering island grapes to the wineries.  I began with a wander through the Turkish part of town, past the minaret, before finding my way past the bell-tower into the gridded lanes of the Greek quarter – a designation verging on historic now that so few elderly Greeks remained – where graceful town houses rose from wide steps to the squared-off bow windows of the upper floors.

I found a gingham-topped table on quiet Lale Sokak (Tulip Street) where I quaffed a carafe of Karalahna with a plate of fresh grilled sardines and a tomato salad soused in pomegranate juice.  The wine was included in the meal price, which in a country rapidly drying from the effects of a spreading Islamic prohibition felt most unusual.  Nor was that the only surprise; from the hot sangria-style wine, and the home-made lemonade flavoured with mint and a stick of cinnamon, and other unfamiliar concoctions chalked on the taverna-style blackboards, themselves so different from the utilitarian white boards favoured on the Turkish mainland, to the trompe l’oeil tulips painted along the foot of the white-washed walls and the Cyrillic characters preferred on the signs of shops and hotels, strange influences were most definitely at work here.  A rare fusion of Aegean Greek and Anatolian Turkish elements mixed with a dash of trendy Istanbul café culture?  Whatever, the result was most agreeable, not least when the meal ended with a flourish courtesy of the house: a tray bearing a glass of water, a thimbleful of home-made cherry liquor, and a shot of strong black coffee.

No question that there’s a buzz about Bozcaada right now.  Recent openings – of boutique hotels, galleries, the odd gift shop, and the highly designed bottle stores of a prestige winery called Corvus, their windows fronted with vintage Harleys – have certainly given the place an upmarket bijou feel.  But this has not done for the island’s broad bohemian streak, as a stroll around the boatyard the following morning confirmed.  I spotted a shack whose tenants, despite a roof weighted with old tyres, kept stacks of cherished books on shelves by the doorways.  The wise words of Sufi visionary Mevlana – ‘Whatever you’re looking for, look within’ – were painted in island blue on white clapboard alongside offerings from Omar Khayyam and Turkish communist poet Nazim Hikmet.

Behind the castle I found my way to the Ege Hotel, the former school house whose rooms are named for an eclectic selection of favourite writers from Aeschylus to Oscar Wilde.  The Ege’s owner, Umit Turan, was an Istanbullu who had first visited the island in the early 1980s when a discerning crowd of actors, artists and even ambassadors were also discovering it.  ‘At that time it was a depopulated and dilapidated place,’ he recalled.  ‘But what really hooked me was the quality of the silence.’  Turan duly bought the school house and converted it into the island’s most characterful hotel, a haven for arty types who do little more than read, swim and wander, and gorge on legendary breakfasts especially notable for the exotic jams which Maytiga Turan makes from the likes of carrots, melons, poppies and aubergines.

This homely and low-key prescription, so distinct from the branded glitz of mainland Bodrum, was precisely my idea of a good time.  So I hired a bike and pedalled off along the few lanes which criss-cross the island.  I had been advised to look out for a new winery called Amadeus which duly appeared among the vineyards.  Trying my luck, I was soon enjoying a glass of white – an island-grown grape called Vasilaki – as Austrian proprietor and long-term summer resident Oliver Giraes rhapsodised over the terroir.   Oliver explained that his father had fallen for the island in the 1990s and wasted no time in setting up home here.  The family had for years been making home-made wines, as most Bozcaada families do, before opening the winery proper on modern commercial lines in 2010.  ‘The climate is almost Californian,’ explained Oliver.  ‘The growing season sees very little rain and there’s a good drying wind.  The summers here are as good for wine-making as they are for living.’

My bike tour soon brought me to a grove of plane trees where a sacred spring rose by a white-washed chapel dedicated to St Paraskevi.  The chapel was locked; the remains of this former monastery were a reminder of the other reason the authorities had had for keeping the foreigners away.  The island’s majority-Greek population suffered grievous persecution, particularly in the 1970s, forcing many of them to leave.  The local saint’s day, July 26th, sees some return to remember their community with wine and song in the shade of these plane trees.

St Paraskevi’s spring, or ayazma, gives its name to the nearby beach which was backed by shack-style restaurants while parasols and sun loungers were available for hire along the sand; if Bozcaada ever ran to crowds, they were to be found at Ayazma.  Further along the coast, the road switch-backed above a series of deserted bays.  Ayana was a gorgeous sand strip, though the jagged reef in the shallows limited me to paddling.  Best of all was Akvaryum, where bleached sand fringed clear waters rich with shoaling fish.  Beyond the bay I trod water and looked seawards to freighters bound for the Dardanelles – and riding at anchor pretty much where the ancient Greeks had once hidden their warships from the Trojans’ view.

The history feels palpable on Bozcaada where it’s tempting to see the expulsions of the island’s Greeks as the settlement of a historic debt – for what the ancient Greeks had once done to the Trojans.  I soon came to appreciate that the islanders traded in no such triumphalism.   Instead, they mostly felt a deep nostalgia for the impressive accommodation Turks and Greeks had once achieved here.  It was there in the sepia photographs of befezzed Turks and Greek fishermen which hung from the walls of boutique hotels like the Kaikias, and in the little island museum where Magnum photographer Ara Guler’s wonderful portraits evoked the island as it was in 1955.   When I remember the island, as I often do, what first springs to mind is not the lovely town nor the elegant old hotels, with their high ceilings, stone staircases and beautifully appointed rooms, neither the vast empty beaches, the cuisine nor the wine, but the sense of reconciliation best expressed by a modest display in the island museum: a collection of old iron keys entitled Our Neighbours, each one labelled with the name of an island Greek – Filo Yarinaki, Andonia Kalfa, Yorgi Istilari – who had made lives elsewhere.

ENDS

Many of Bozcaada’s hotels and services shut between October and April.

Getting there:  The car ferry terminal at Geyikli Yukyeri, with departures every two hours but less during the winter (£2.50pp return), is a six-hour drive from Istanbul and four hours from Izmir.  Passenger ferries run through the summer direct from Canakkale. www.gestasdenizulasim.com.tr

Eating:

Café at Lisa’s (00 90 286 6970182); island institution by the old harbour run by an ex-pat Australian and doing a welcome line comfort food like spaghetti, pizzas and omelettes.

Hasan Tefik (00 90 286 2173949): a restaurant run out a private kitchen which serves local dishes – cicek dolmasi (stuffed courgette blossoms) or ahtapot fume (smoked octopus) to tables in the adjacent alley.  I had my favourite meal on the island – a bowl of bite-sized stuffed vine leaves served hot – here.

Lale Café (00 90 532 7441535): classic taverna simplicity and a simple menu, often sardines, salad and wine, served in bucolic back-street settting.

 

Getting around: Bikes can be hired from the Akhi gift shop (00 90 286 6970307) at £10 per day.  Dolmus minibuses serve Ayazma Beach depending on demand.

Reading:  Mother Land by Dmetri Kakmi (Eland, £16.99) is the moving memoir of an exiled islander.

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