DATCA in "CONDE NAST TRAVELLER"

An article about Datca is published in England in magazine of Conde Nast Traveller’s Sept. İssue
(Article by Jeremy Seal.)

A TASTE OF HONEY

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. And it’s within hopping distance of Greek islands.

‘You don’t want to go there,’ advised the petrol attendant at Masrmaris, twirling an index finger at his right temple. İt was not the first time I had been warned against visiting the Datça peninsula, the 45 kilometer finger of little-visited uplands on Turkey’s south-west corner. Turks regards the Balıkaşıran (or Fish leap), the narrow isthmus that connects the peninsula with the mainland some 20 kilometer west of Marmaris, as a psychological Robicon: to cross it is to unhinge, along with the local topography which descends into a disorienting scatter of gulfs, bays, capes, coves and aven intrusively adcesent 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 south-west Turkey got. İt was too tempting for words.
An atrocious access road has long kept the Datca Peninsuala largely off-limits; quite an achivement given that the trio of adjecent 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 car ferry which serves it from Bodrum. For a panoramic spectacular of the Peninsula’s back water virtues, the two-hour ferry crossing remains the best way to arrive. You leave behind the unsightly white villas that sprawl beyond Bodrum, and cross the Gulf of Gökova looking out for dolphines, to quite another landscape: the north shore of the peninsula at Karaköy, empty except for ruined windmills and a single minaret, and a Hebridean-style harbour mole amid an Amazonian luxuriance of sandalwood, wild pistochia and mastic trees.
But I was arriving by the newly surfaced and widened road. I crossed onto to peninsula without knowing quite when I had done so; there was no sudden outbreak of loopiness nor leaping fish to signal the moment, and the fjord-like contours with high rusty bluff consealed wievs of the isthmus, But it was not before I knew I had arrived. What little development there was beyond Marmaris gave way to pine forests and olive grooves. Bleached blue beehives covered the hillsides, ( honey is a peninsula speciality along with the almonds and fish.) A horse hauled and a cart along a farm track And at the somnolent village of Reşadiye, I drew up beneath a great plane tree and passed through a gate into walled gardens heavy with rose scent.The laens were scattered with hammocks and shade kiosks. I had arrived at Reşadiye’s konağı, or mansion, which was opened as a small hotel in 2004.
The past twenty years has seen the desruction of so much of Turkey’s provincial peripd architecture in favour of concrete that this fine building the early -19th- century residens of one Mehmet Ali, a local aga or chiftain, is probably unique. Not only have its Turkish owner-managers, the Pir Family, restored it- the original hamam, an acreage of intricately patterned wooden ceilings, the bedrooms’ window shutters, sleeping platforms and arched stone fireplaces- with remarkable fidelity and at eye popping cost, they have also inroduced faultless modern bathrooms and service standarts. Calling it a ‘museum Hotel; as the Pirs like to do, may convey the Konag’s heritage-the restored frescoes of İstanbul waterside scenes in the main room and likeably odd fictures such as the Bakelide phones in the badrooms- but fails to conjure the perveasive charm of a place stuffed with flavoured perches: the extra-wide and roofed veranda. For example where I sat one night in a state of genuine entransment and watched the dusk creep across the perfumed garden as the loudest of owls began to call.
I explored the peninsula in the knowlageable company of Nihat Akkaraca. This veteran local historian showed me around Eski (OLD) Datca, which had been the peninsula’s main settlement back in his school days. The place was but all abondened by the 1980’s when presperous İstanbullus and northern Europeans began acquiring old houses here. They have since restored the village as a verdant corner with very Datça, this –strong artistic and ecological insticts. As we wondered the rutted country lanes which run between stone houses, kichen 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 has 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 going down to the sea at Kargı. Here was Datça style in microcosom: a simple, vine-shaded cafe above the shore where a rickety wooden jetty thrust into the bay, and a shingle beach with three sunbaters who had each attracted a bevy of attandant geese. A barrel-vaulted church, abondened since the expulsion of the local Greeks back in the 1920s, stood dung splattered in a walled yard where cattle were kept. Along the water front were old stone warehouses which had stored volania acorns, one-time mainstay of the dyeing industry. Volania oaks had once covered the peninsula, shading Nihat’s walks to school, untill artificial dyes did for them in the 1960s. Breaking from his reverie, Nihat retired to Kargı’s cafe 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. İt passed through wooded hills riven by deep river gorges, each with its pink seam of oliander. Ruined barley mills stood along the banks. The shallow domes of the rounded water cisterns resemled mosques that had failed to rise. On a whim, Nihat veered of down a track in search of honey. We drove through scattered goats to the village of Sındı which seemed , with its shawled women praying behind cottage windows and the shy men exercising their worry beads outside the tea house, like a set-piece from the Türkish 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 -28kg for about 40 pounds- and slung it easily onto his 75-year-old shoulders.
The road led onward beneath overhanging carob trees. Surviving stacks of overgrown ashlar sprouted from the hillsides. We were approching the peninsula’s end , the site of its one recognised attraction: the antique port of Knidos, whose bluff-backed harbours had been a heaven for shipping from the 4th century BC. The city was home to famed astronomers, architects and historians, but Knidos’ best- known inhabitant was its nude Aphrodite. According to Pliny, many people came here simply to admire the statue One of the supposedly stained her marble tigh by the force of his embrace, a perfectly Datça type scandal. The statue was long since lost; Nihat and I contented ourselves with less salacious visions- of triremes and star gazers and the 19th century plunderings (Now in 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 Datça one evening and stumbled across Fevzi’s Place. This apparently nondescript restaurant was tucked away among the usual Türkish motley of ironmongers, mobile-phone dealers and carpet shops, and, it served fish. But not fish as I know it. I was expecting the coastal standarts for the Türkish south-west grilled barbunya (red mullet) or palamut (tuna) served with chips and a tomato-and-onion salad. What I got was octobus meatballs followed by a cuttlefish stew. There was a salad of tender , lightly pickled caper sprigs and a plate of something.called deniz börülcesi, which the dictionary manfully rendered as black-eyed sea peas’ (it was some kind of samphire). The following night, at the Mehmet Ali Konak’s excelent 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 wishpered that the plentifull wild boar, forbidden by İslam , continued to have a clandestine place in cooking. Nihat had spoken of famines in his childhood and I recalled that George Bean rowing pioneer of Türkish archeology, had writing of having had in 1950 the greatest difficulty in getting enough to eat’ on the peninsula. Necessity had inspired, it seemed, an intentive local cuisine.




Then there were the İslands from another world, The Greek Southern Dodecanese, which ring the peninsula to the west and south. Their high backs turn purple towards sunset. Os and Nissiros, Tilos and Rhodes but none was as invitingly as Symi Islands and mainland had been an united territory under the control of Rhodes in ancient times, but mutual suspicions of Greeks and Turks had made it difficult 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 İsland initially appeared as acres of dazzling, inhospitable limestone, but concealed at the head of its deeply intended 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 white washed boxes below tiled roofs-with an excwss of decoration; the plaster work on the low -pitched porticoes picked out in yellows, brown and blues, the wooden shutters, iron- railed balconies, pedimented front doors and the ground- level hems of white wash. Here, too were churchyards with cypresses and herring-bone mosaics in black-and-white pebbles, chiming bells and higher up the steps of the Katarraktes, the war-bombed shells and derelicts mansions, hand-shaped brass knockers still clinging to their weathered doors. At the venerable waterfront Aliki hotel, which a local ship’s captaın had built as a dowry for his daughter, there was fin de stecle china and a bookish British clientele who came , they said, becauıse nowhere else in the world looked quşte like this.
Nicholas Shum, ex-pat South African editor of the Island newspaper, drove me across the island the following morning. He 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 cfountry chapels and monastries. At St Michael of Red Earth, the shrine was flanked by simply furnished cells for visiting pilgrims. İn the shade of the ancient, buckled cypresses tree a tin bucket drew chill water from a cistern.
The road led to the remote southern coast where a perfect pond of a harbour was hemmed by brilliant-white monastry of Panormitis, patron of dodecanese sailors. There were hospices , a refectory and ornate belltower and , in the candle –lit katholikon, novist priest were stroking the smoke- stained frescoes with their kissed fingers.The only other building was and old peopl’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 monastry, raki and retsina; cultural elements which were too often kept separate despitye the geographical proximity of these communities. And from where I was now sitting, halfway between the two (around about where the swimmers annually came together), Greek island and Turkish peninsula looked aqually alluring.
Datca is a excellent year-round destination, with mild winters, restuarants that remain open out of season, and fine weather that only breaks in November. Go there for late summer sun.