Datça Peninsula Articles
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A TASTE OF HONEY
Conde Nast Traveller, September 2006
With its beehives and beaches, olive groves and vine-shaded cafes, Turkey’s Datca Peninsula is a bucolic treat ripe for discovery, says Jeremy Seal.
‘You don’t want to go there,’ advised the petrol attendant at Marmaris, twirling an index finger at his right temple. It was not the first time I had been warned against visiting the Datca Peninsula, the 70-mile finger of little-visited uplands at Turkey’s southwest corner. Turks regard the Balikasiran or ‘Fish Leap’, the narrow isthmus which connects the peninsula with the mainland some thirty miles west of Marmaris, as a psychological Rubicon; to cross it is to unhinge, along with the local topography which descends into a disorienting scatter of gulfs, bays, capes, coves and even intrusively adjacent Greek islands such as Symi. But I had heard different; that the locals were not mad so much as different – raffish, maverick and unorthodox – and that their peninsula was as unspoiled and bucolic as southwest Turkey got. It was too tempting for words.
An atrocious access road has long kept the Datca Peninsula largely off-limits; quite an achievement given that the trio of adjacent holiday destinations – Marmaris, Rhodes and Bodrum – would appear to have it backed into a corner marked for comparable development. Until last year, when the access road was dramatically improved, the peninsula was effectively an island; so much so that it was best reached by the compact little car ferry, a kind of Anatolian Cal-Mac, which serves it from Bodrum. And for a panoramic spectacular of the peninsula’s backwater virtues, the two-hour ferry crossing remains the way to arrive. You leave behind the unsightly white villas which increasingly sprawl beyond Bodrum, particularly at Bitez, and cross the Gulf of Gokova, looking out for dolphins, to quite another landscape; the north shore of the peninsula at Karakoy, unsettled except for ruined windmills and a single minaret, and a Hebridean-style harbour mole amid an Amazonian luxuriance of sandalwood, wild pistachio and mastic trees.
But I was arriving by the newly surfaced and widened road. I crossed onto the peninsula without knowing quite when I had done so; there was no sudden bout of loopiness nor leaping fish to signal the moment and the fjord-like contours with high rusty bluffs concealed views of the isthmus. But it was not long before I knew I had arrived. What little development there was beyond Marmaris gave way to pine forests and olive groves. Bleached blue beehives covered the hillsides (honey is a peninsula speciality, along with almonds and fish). A horse hauled a cart along a farm track. And at the somnolent village of Resadiye, I drew up beneath a great plane tree and passed through a gate into walled gardens heavy with rose scent. The lawns were scattered with hammocks and shaded kiosks. I had arrived at Resadiye’s konak, or mansion, which was opened as a small and enchanting hotel in 2004.
The last twenty years has seen the destruction of so much of Turkey’s provincial period architecture in favour of concrete that this fine building, the early-nineteenth century residence of one Mehmet Ali, a local agha or chieftain, is probably unique. Not only have its Turkish owner-managers, the Pir family, restored it with remarkable fidelity and at eye-popping cost – the original hammam, a positive acreage of intricately patterned wooden ceilings, the bedroom’s window shutters, sleeping platforms and arched stone fireplaces – but they have also introduced faultless modern bathrooms and service standards. Calling it a ‘museum hotel’, as the Pirs like to do, may convey the konak’s heritage – the restored narrative frescoes of Istanbul waterside scenes in the main room and likeably odd fixtures such as the bakelite phones in the bedrooms – but fails to get across the pervasive charm of a place stuffed with favoured perches; the extra-wide and roofed verandah fronting the house on the first floor, for example, where I sat one night in a state of genuine entrancement and watched the dusk creep across the perfumed garden as the loudest of owls began to call.
I explored the peninsula in the knowledgeable company of Nihat Akkaraca. This veteran local historian showed me around Eski (Old) Datca which had been the peninsula’s main settlement back in Nihat’s school days. The place was all-but abandoned by the 1980s when prosperous Istanbullus and Northern Europeans began acquiring old houses here. They have since restored the village as a verdant corner with – very Datca, this – strong artistic and ecological instincts, and an increasing magnet for self-catering holidaymakers. As we wandered the rutted country lanes which ran between stone houses, kitchen gardens and walled orchards, Nihat evoked the world of his childhood here. He pointed out the home of the former quack whose cure-all was a cupful of blood tapped from his captive turtle (though Nihat’s mother had preferred to be shipped to Symi when she got ill).
We explored the peninsula’s country mosques, ancient wine presses and pagan ceremonial sites before coming down to the sea at Kargi. Here was Datca style in microcosm; a simple vine-shaded café above the shore where a rickety wooden jetty thrust into the bay, and a shingle beach with three sunbathers who had each attracted a bevy of attendant geese. A barrel-vaulted church, abandoned since the expulsion of the local Greeks back in the 1920s, stood dung-splattered in a walled yard where cattle were kept. Along the waterfront were old stone warehouses which had stored valonia acorns, one-time mainstay of the dyeing industry. Valonia oaks had once covered the peninsula, shading Nihat’s walks to school, until artificial dyes did for them in the 1960s. Breaking from his reverie, Nihat retired to Kargi’s café to drink coffee laced with the local honey (he swore by its health-giving qualities) while I took a swim in the bay.
The road to the west followed the spine of the peninsula. It passed through wooded hills riven by deep river gorges, each with its pink seam of oleander. Ruined barley mills stood along the banks. The shallow domes of the rounded water cisterns resembled mosques which had failed to rise. On a whim, Nihat veered off down a track in search of honey. We drove through scattered goats to the village of Sindi which seemed, with its shawled women praying behind their cottage windows and the shy men exercising their worry beads outside the tea house, like a set-piece from the Turkish east. Never had the lights of Bodrum, with its outdoor discos and lewdly named cocktails, seemed more distant. Nihat found the honey man at a nearby shed. He bought a barrel of the stuff – 28 kilos for about £40 – and slung it easily onto his 75-year-old shoulders.
The road led onwards beneath overhanging carob trees. Surviving stacks of overgrown ashlar sprouted from the hillsides. We were approaching the peninsula’s end, the site of its one recognized ‘attraction’; the antique port of Knydos whose bluff-backed harbours had been a haven for shipping from the fourth century BC. The city was home to famed astronomers, architects and historians but Knydos’ best known inhabitant was its nude Aphrodite. According to Pliny, many people came here simply to admire the statue. One of them supposedly stained her marble thigh by the force of his embrace; a perfectly Datca-type scandal. The statue was long since lost; Nihat and I contented ourselves with less salacious visions – of triremes and star gazers and the nineteenth-century plunderings (now in the British Museum) of Sir Charles Newton – which the city’s surviving basilica arches, floor mosaics and magnificent waterside theatre vividly conjured.
I went out to eat in Datca one evening and stumbled across Fevzi’s Place. This apparently nondescript restaurant was tucked away among the usual Turkish motley of ironmongers, mobile phone dealers and carpet shops, and it did fish. Just not as I knew it. I was expecting the coastal culinary standards for the Turkish southwest; grilled barbunya (red mullet) or palamut (tuna) served with chips and a salad of tomatoes and onion. What I got – first-hand evidence of the distinctive local culture – was octopus meatballs followed by a cuttlefish stew. There was a salad of tender, lightly pickled caper sprigs and a plate of something called deniz borulcesi which the dictionary manfully rendered as black-eyed sea peas (it was some kind of local samphire). The following night, at the Mehmet Ali Konak’s excellent Elaki Restaurant, many of these dishes came round again, trumped this time with a pudding of savoury-sweet dumplings made from cheese and crushed carob pods. I had even heard it whispered that the plentiful wild boar, forbidden by Islam, continued to have a clandestine place in local cooking. Nihat had spoken of famines in his childhood and I recalled that George Bean, roving pioneer of Turkish archaeology, had written of having had in 1950 ‘the greatest difficulty in getting enough to eat’ on the peninsula. Necessity had inspired, it seemed, an inventive local cuisine.
Then there were the islands from another world, the Greek Southern Dodecanese, which ringed the peninsula to the west and south. Their high backs turned purple towards sunset; Kos and Nissiros, Tilos and Rhodes, but none was as invitingly close as Symi. Islands and mainland had been a united territory under the control of Rhodes in ancient times, but the mutual suspicions of Greeks and Turks had made it difficult for visitors to move freely between the two more recently. Last year, however, the authorities on Symi encouraged traffic across the five-mile strait by slashing their mooring rates, and though services are not yet routine nor shuttle-cheap I was able to find a Datca boat bound for Symi. The island initially appeared as acres of dazzling but inhospitable limestone, but concealed at the head of its deeply indented harbour was an intact Neoclassical harbour town in equal parts picturesque decay and sympathetic restoration. Nineteenth-century Symi had flourished on sponges and shipping; the depopulated mainland opposite had barely signified except for timber supplies. The houses seemed to compensate for their structural simplicity – as whitewashed boxes below tiled roofs – with an excess of decoration; the plasterwork on the low-pitched porticoes picked out in yellows, browns and blues, the wooden shutters, iron-railed balconies, pedimented front doors and the ground-level hems of whitewash. Here too were church yards with cypresses and herring-bone mosaics in black and white pebble, chiming bells and, higher up the steep steps of the Katarraktes, the war-bombed shells of derelict mansions, hand-shaped brass knockers still clinging to their weathered doors. And in the pick of the island’s hotels, the venerable waterfront Aliki which a local ship’s captain had built as a dowry for his daughter, there was fin-de-siecle china and a bookish British clientele who came, they said, because nowhere else in the world looked quite like this.
Nicholas Shum, ex-pat South African editor of the island newspaper, drove me across the island the following morning. Nicholas told me that the links with Datca had been strengthening recently; Orthodox Greeks and Muslim Turks annually swam out to meet halfway across the dividing strait in a gesture of friendship. Beyond Horio, the hillside settlement above the harbour, the habitations soon petered out. The high interior was threaded by hiking trails which led through pines and cypresses to a profusion of country chapels and monasteries, all endowed and maintained by local families. At St Michael of the Red Earth, the shrine was flanked by simply furnished cells for visiting pilgrims. In the shade of an ancient, buckled cypress tree a tin bucket drew chill water from a cistern.
The road led to the remote southern end of the island where a perfect pond of a harbour was hemmed by the brilliant-white monastery of Panormitis, patron of Dodecanese sailors. There were hospices, a refectory and ornate belltower, and in the candle-lit katholikon novice priests were stroking the smoke-stained frescoes with their kissed fingers. The only other building was an old people’s home. Panormitis was where the locals came for their final wind-down; as much, it seemed, Symi’s Eastbourne as its Athos.
Nicholas returned me to the waterfront where I took a boat back to Datca. I felt richer for having been able to combine Turkish and Hellenic, mosque and monastery, raki and retsina; cultural elements which were too often kept separate despite the geographical proximity of these communities. And from where I was now sitting, half-way between the two (around about where the swimmers annually came together), Greek island and Turkish peninsula looked equally alluring.
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TAKE A NEW ROAD TO ANCIENT TURKEY
Sunday Times, 18th July 2004
It’s an authentic taste of the old Med: now the Datca peninsula is easy to reach, says Jeremy Seal
A pair of owls studied our car’s arrival at Manzarali Ev – the House with a View – from the branch of the carob tree opposite. They had clearly been on the perch early, and watched with rapt attention as we lugged our bags into the airy stone-built house. They were still there as we opened a bottle of Turkish white wine on the patio. And as night fell, when they began to call, they were clearly discussing the details of our arrival with every last owl along the 50 miles of Turkey’s remote Datca peninsula.
The owls’ interest was understandable; largely because of the appalling roads, land-based visitors have been a rarity to this mountainous finger of land that avoids islandhood by a mere half mile (it clings to Western Anatolia by a narrow isthmus which the Turks know as ‘fish leap’). The little ports and coves of this peninsula, which runs west from Marmaris – the contrast with that strident resort is striking – have instead become favourite haunts of visiting yachts and traditional wooden gulets. Following the recent transformation of the access road, however, the first of the tour operators have included the peninsula in this year’s brochure (see box) as its atmospheric, unspoilt charms come within reach of landlubbers; the restored Greek village of Eski Datca, raffish ports like Palamut, and the ruins of antique Knydos clinging to the peninsula’s western tip.
The house stood among almond groves and ruined Greek houses above the village of Mesudiye where the road had dwindled to a Turkish track. It had wide wooden balconies and was true to its name; the sea views to the south, beyond the quiet coves at Hayitbuku and Ovabuku, were of the overlapping island outlines of Greek Symi and Rhodes. Until the 1990s, when only a camel track connected Mesudiye with the peninsula’s port at Datca, emergency doctors were summoned from across the water on Symi. Even now, islanders from Symi make the crossing every Saturday to stock up at Datca’s market. As Fatosh, Manzarali Ev’s owner, explained: ‘The peninsula feels decidedly cut off; out here, you might as well be on an island.’
At Mesudiye, old men slumbered on the patio of the coffee house with still-smouldering cigarettes clamped between their lips. They woke with the lunchtime muezzin to pad across the street to the mosque. The village shop, an annexe of the coffee house, was a cavernous cupboard. A young boy sold us thyme-scented village honey, which the peninsula is famous for, and a jar of homemade salca, the tomato and pepper puree at the heart of Turkish cooking.
We followed a coastal track to Gabaklar, if only because the name translated as Pumpkins. We were rewarded with a deserted shingle beach and a family-run restaurant where we sat beneath mulberry trees heavy with the drone of wasps and ate superb local specialities including deniz borulcesi (a kind of samphire) and grilled baby squid with a rocket salad. We were soon on kissing terms with the owner, for Sevgi loved children, in the Turkish way, while we, in an equally English way, were taken by the bills she brought us; 40 million lira, or £17 to feed the family in style. She also told us of the national mint’s imminent plans to offload several zeros, bane of the Turkish holiday, from the currency.
The coast road to the west ran above a series of secret coves. We had selected one for a late-morning swim when a large herd of goats joined us. The goatherd descended from the rocky heights quite as nimbly as her charges to shoo them away. Not for the first time, we found ourselves explaining that tourists liked things just as they were on the peninsula, and that included goat invasions; she replied with the news that she was eighty years old, or thereabouts. We pushed on to the nearby port of Palamut; after Pumpkins, how could you not take in a place that translated as Tuna? Palamut was snoozing its way through the summer. There were waterfront restaurants but none of the slick besuited touts stationed in most Turkish resorts, only discreet burning braziers to indicate that food was available. It was only once we had seated ourselves beneath the tamarisk trees that a shy waiter summoned up the courage to approach. A shingle beach lapped by the clearest waters lay below us; a village dog had made itself comfortable in the shade of a sun umbrella. A single gulet was tethered in the harbour.
One day, we drove the length of the peninsula through alternately Cretan and Corsican landscapes; wild valleys threaded with pink veins of riverside oleander, plains dotted with ruined windmills and scruffy villages where the market stalls sold only vegetables and shoes. The road was being improved right to its tip, where the ruins of Knydos with its famed waterside amphitheatre stand at the meeting point of the Aegean and Mediterranean. There were yachts in the renowned natural harbour, but these days even the carpark was getting some use. The road was 2,000 years too late to save the city from ruin. It had once been the centre of a love cult and home to a statue of naked Aphrodite, supposedly the finest in the world (now lost), that had apparently acquired a telling stain on the thigh from the exuberant early-hour attentions of a love-struck youth. I confess I came over all prudish; if you wanted that sort of thing, there was always modern Marmaris or Bodrum. Personally, I preferred the peninsula as it was now, little visited and undeveloped, with only the owls active in the night.