by Fatih Canözüen at the age of seven or eight years, the onions on the land of his father planted over Kabak Bay, saw his first foreigner. Before the road came in 1980, his village was extremely distant on the jagged coast of the Lycia region in southwestern Türkiye, isolated from steep valleys and mountains that plunged into the sea. His family took two days to get into the city of Fethiye in the Wickel -Desel tracks to sell their apricots, vegetables and honey on the market. Despite his shock to penetrate the outside world for the first time, Canözü recalls that tourism was the future.
Four decades later, Canözü not only built a restaurant and 14 tourist huts in Kabak, but also married a foreigner: a former Middle East correspondent from England, which came here to explore and fall in love. Now they are raising their family on this wild edge of Anatolia’s Turkish coast, a region, the Mustafa Kemal Atatetsürk, the founding father of the Republic of Türkiye, described the most beautiful in the country.
Kabak Beach has long been known for his alternative mood
The olive garden has its name from the 200 to 300 olive trees that grow on the terrace hill above sea level. Cane Father dug her into the mountains and pushed her here on her back, proof of the years of hard work that needed to do this place. Canözü designed the cabins itself and built them in wood and stone to minimize the ecological footprint. Then he installed an Infinity pool in which his family once made grain. When the restaurant opened in 2005, he waited for 45 days for nerve -wrackers, for his first customers. People came slowly.
My wife and I stay here for four nights and first sleep in a standard cabin and then in one of two luxury huts with a view of the sea. The room is airy, glass and jaw, but we spend most of the time to sit outside on the deck and to be constantly amazed at the view. On the other side of the forested valley, immense limestone walls rise, which mark the southern range of the Taurus mountain – the summit nearby is slightly lower than Ben Nevis. On the beach below, a sand ship meets surprisingly blue water. Kabak Beach has long been known for his alternative atmosphere, a place where hippies groups together with Muslim families, women in Burkinis and dogs on the sand.
This feeling of coexistence – something that many see as the heart of modern turquo more – extends to sea life: at sunset, half of the beach is clarified for the nesting of loggerhead turtles.
On the street, the village of Kabak is literally the end of the line, which together with the robust terrain contributed to protecting it from overdevelopment that has been suffered elsewhere by resorts.
The mountains are huge and wild, the forests are full of boar and the turtles still return to the beaches every year
On foot, it is a resting place on a longer, slower journey. One of the things that travelers bring here is the 470-mile Lycian-Weg, which was founded in 1999 by a British-Turkish woman named Kate Clow who still lives on site. We hike sections of this world -famous hiking trail, first on a rocky path through the pine forest and strawberry trees, to visit a nearby waterfall. Some beach party stragglers ended up after a long night, so we plunge into the blow of the techno. A few minutes and the path takes us back to the wild silence.
The next day I go south for two hours while others continue by boat. We meet Cennet Koyu, which is translated as a Paradise Bay. No street has found its way to this beach and deserves its name. Swimming here, in water, which is as clear as glass with steep green mountains that climb behind it is as close to paradise as you can imagine. At the top of the forest is one of the “camps” founded in front of the Gentrified Tourism – the outposts of the vague piratic travelers who keep things down to date. Dogs, chickens and donkeys wander between the trees.
The boat, which was tattooed by a local man with an anchor behind his ear, leads us through the next country goals to the location of a destroyed village. His archway and the collapsed stone walls, which are swallowed half by green, are proof of the darker history of this coastal section. Kalabantia was once inhabited by Greeks, forced to give up her beautiful home during the brutal “population exchange”, which was followed by the Turkish War of Independence in the 1920s. Nobody came to take their place – it was to be remote for local Turks – and now his stones sink back into the country from which they came.
A 45-minute drive away is the much larger settlement of Kayaköy, formerly Levissi, from which over 6,000 Greeks were deported to a “home” in 1923 that they had never seen before. This melancholic ghost town with 500 roofless houses is almost completely abandoned, but for stroking goats and tourists. In his Orthodox chapels and churches, there is something particularly tragic, with their painted stars still stinging the ceilings. Oddly enough, I found that I have been here before: Under the fictional name Eskibahçe, this was the backdrop of Louis de Bernières’ new birds without wings, which describes how nationalism had lived on the multicultural communities that had lived on the Ottoman rule for centuries.
The Greek influence can also be seen in Lycia’s most famous ruins: the felkers carved graves that we saw on the way here from Fethiye. They were made by the old Lycians, which mixed the Hellenic architecture with the Persian technique of the cit structures from the living rock. Smaller graves, which resemble stone, resemble the lid boxes made of stone, are scattered in the mountains and along the Lycian species, monuments to another cultures that have disappeared from Anatolia.
Life was never settled here. Kabak was perhaps still remote, but the road has inevitably brought changes, and since the opening of the olive garden, trees have been poured bulldozed and concrete, although the construction tempo has apparently slowed down in recent years.
With increasing number of visitors, the water supply is a major problem, during this time, constantly growing temperatures followed by the risk of forest fires. But other things remain similar. Where the street the mountains are still huge and wild, the forests are still full of boar and the turtles are still returning to the beaches every year. As in other places where beauty masked a harder existence, a balance must be made: Without tourism – including hikers who occur in the Lycian way – many young people would be forced to move somewhere else instead of working on site as the employees of the Olive Garden. At least for now, Kabak feels on the right side of this balance.
We eat last night Imam BayildiWhich means as “the imam in fainting” – probably because the dish is so good – roasted with onions, tomatoes and garlic, soaked in olive oil and suffocated with melted cheese. The food was consistently fresh, local and delicious. The moon shines on the walls of the valley that shine as bright as bones. We learned a new word YakamozMy favorite in Turkish or in another language: it describes the sparkling moonlight on dark water. There are poems in this country. Every culture that has a word for it has to do something right.
Standard huts at Olive Garden Kabak (olivegardenkabak.com) from £ 70Luxury huts £ 120 (both sleep two), inclusive breakfast
