The Sunday Times - 18 July, 2004
Take a new road to ancient Turkey It’s an authentic of the old Med: now the Datca peninsula is easy to reach, says Jeremy Seal.
A pair of owls studied the arrival of our car from the branch of the carob tree opposite. They had clearly been on the perch early, and watched with rapt attention as our two girls, aged six and three, set about dragging luggage into the airy stone-built house before losing interest and running off to explore. 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 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, which avoids islandhood by a mere half mile (it clings to western Anatolia by a narrow isthmus that 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 has included the peninsula in this year’s brochure.
The area has a lot to offer: the resorted village of Eski Datca, raffish ports such as Palamut Buku, the ruins of antique Cnidus clinging to the peninsula’s western tip, and – an atmosphere of unspoilt charm that much of this coast has lost.
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, our hosue 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 honey, for which the peninsula is famous, and a jar of home-made salca the tomato and pepper purée at the heart of Turkish cooking.
We followed a coastal track to Gabaklar, simply because the name translated as “Pumkins”. 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 seaweed) 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: 40m lira, or £15, to feed the family in style.
On another morning, we followed the coast road to the west, where it 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 80 years old, or thereabouts.
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 Cnidus, with its framed waterside amphitheatre, stand at the meeting point of the Aegean and the Mediterranean.
The road was 2,000 years too late to save the city. It had once been the centre of a love cult and home to a statue of the naked Aphrodite, supposedly the finest in the world (now lost), which 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.