Conde Nast Traveller – September 2006
A TASTE OF HONEY
With its beehives and beaches, olive groves and vine-shaded cafes, Turkey’s Datça 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 Marmaris, twirling an index finger at his right temple. It was not the first time I had been warned against visiting the Datça peninsula, the 45km finger of little visited uplands on Turkey’s South-west corner. Turks regard the Balikasiran (or ‘Fish Leap’), the narrow isthmus that connects the peninsula with the mainland some 20km west of Marmaris, as psychological Rubicon: to cross it is to unhinge, along with the local topography which descends into a disorientating scatter of gulfs, bays, capes, coves and even intrusively adjacent Greek islands such as Simi.
But I had heard different; that 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. It was too tempting for words.
An atrocious access road has long kept the Datça 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 car ferry which serves it from Bodrum. For a panoramic spectacular of the peninsula’s backwater 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 Gokova, looking out for dolphins, to quite another landscape: the north shore of the peninsula at Karakoy, empty 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 outbreak 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 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 Konagi, or mansion, which was opened as a small hotel in 2004.
The past 20 years has seen the destruction of so much of Turkey’s provincial period architecture in favour of concrete that this fine building, the early-19th-century residence of one Mehmet Ali, a local aga or chieftain, is probably unique. Not only have its Turkish owner-managers, The Pir family, restored it – the original hammam, 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 introduced faultless modern bathrooms and service standards.
Calling it a ‘museum hotel’, as the Pirs like to do, may convey the konagi’s heritage – the restored frescoes of Istanbul waterside scenes in the main room and likeably odd fixtures such as the Bakelite phones in the bedrooms – but fails to conjure the pervasive charm of a place stuffed with favoured perches; the extra-wide and roofed veranda, 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) Datça, which had been the peninsula’s main settlement back in his 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 Datça, this - strong artistic and ecological instincts.
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 Simi 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 Kargi. Here was Datça 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 to 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 that 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 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 – 28kg 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 recognised ‘attraction’: the antique port of Knidos, whose bluff –backed harbours had been a haven 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 Pilny, 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 Datça-type scandal. The statue was long since lost; Nihat and I contended ourselves with less salacious visions – of triremes and star gazers and the 19th-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 Datça 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 served fish. But not fish as I knew it. I was expecting the coastal standards for the Turkish south-west: grilled barbunya (red mullet) or palamut (tuna) served with chips and a tomato-and-onion salad. What I got was octopus meatballs followed by 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 ‘blacked-eyed sea peas’ (it was some kind of samphire).
The following night, at the Mehmet Ali Konak’s excellent Elaki Restaurant, many of the 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 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 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 ring the peninsula to the west and south. Their high backs turn purple towards sunset: Kos and Nissiros, Tilos and Rhodes, but none was as invitingly close as Simi. Islands and mainland had a united territory under the control of Rhodes in ancient times, but the mutual suspicions of Greeks and Turks had made it difficult to move freely between the two more recently. Last year, however, the authorities on Simi 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 Datça boat bound for Simi.
The island initially appeared as acres of dazzling, 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 Simi 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 yellow, browns and blues, the wooden shutters, iron-railed balconies, pedimented front doors and the ground-level hems of whitewash.
Here, too, were churchyards with cypresses and herring-bone mosaics in black-and-white pebbles, 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. At the venerable waterfront Aliki hotel, which a local ship’s captain had built as dowry for his daughter, there was a 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. He told me that the links with Datça 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. 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 coast 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. Parnormitis was where the locals came for their final wind-down; as much, it seemed, Simi’s Eastbourne as its Athos.
Nicholas returned me to the waterfront where I took a boat back to Datça. 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, halfway between the two (around about where the swimmers annually came together), Greek island and Turkish peninsula looked equally alluring.
Exclusive Escapes represent Mehmet Ali Aga Konaki and include visits to Simi on its Gulet itineraries and an overnight yacht adventure from Kumlubuk.