First Impressions of the Turkish Mediterranean

I remember the first time I caught sight of the sparkling turquoise water of the Mediterranean Sea. It was nine years ago, almost to the day, and I was gazing dreamily at it from a cliff near the Italian Riviera town of Riomaggiore. It was the perfect first view of this sea that had conjured such imagination in my North American heart and mind. I still remember the activity of boats and fishermen and Italian words down at the harbour. I remember the setting sun spotlighting the pale reds and yellows of the old waterfront buildings. I remember my impending excitement at the hike through the five historic towns of Cinque Terre I would walk the next day.

A few weeks ago, I felt the same impending excitement as we drove down from the mountains of the Anatolian heartland onto Turkey’s balmy Mediterranean coast. And when I glimpsed again those same turquoise waters, I felt, well, disappointed.

We were seeing the Mediterranean Sea from Mersin’s traffic-clogged roads. Shopping centers and giant supermarkets lined the streets. Sunburnt tourists sat half-naked at roadside tourist cafes. It was a far cry from the wide open spaces and peaceful emptiness we’d left in Anatolia.

As we drove along the coast in search of a campsite that wasn’t right along the side of the coastal highway, I wondered if we had made the wrong choice in coming here. I’d felt more drawn to Turkey’s the Black Sea coast, but Bruno had told me the Mediterranean coast was the best part of Turkey. Maybe it had been twenty years ago, I thought, but now, modernization had arrived in full force, and appeared to leave the place devoid of what I’d come to love about Turkey this past month.

Bruno seemed content, at least. Not by the traffic and the development and the roadside campsite, but by the familiarity of the landscape. Bruno grew up on France’s Mediterranean, and he was revelling in the similar sights and smells in an almost nostalgic way. We drove past mangled olive trees and he talked about those growing in his father’s garden. We saw tortoises on the side of the road and he reminisced about following tortoises on all fours from his childhood home to the sea. Once, we absentmindedly walked past a fig tree and he stopped, sniffed, and declared “FIG!” before looking up and triumphantly pointing out the green fruits hanging from the tree. The figs weren’t even ripe!

It’s amazing how places can conjure such nostalgic memory-sifting.

It’s also amazing how once you get over the disappointment of expectation, you can actually have a lot of fun! Bruno and I set to work forgetting about the downsides of the Turkish Mediterranean in favour of picnic lunches along the water and afternoons on the beach. We biked, hiked, and strolled our way along beaches, into orchards, and through villages of red mud tinted on old whitewashed rock walls. We picked lemons and oranges and mulberries (I had purple fingers for days!) from overflowing fruit trees. We admired unique seashells and weird prickly plants.

Best of all, we visited the ruins of ancient cities. The Mediterranean coast takes a step further back into history than what I’d experienced in Cappadocia, Southeastern Anatolia, or Istanbul – Ancient Greece and Rome. This coastline was very much a part of both empires, and there are theaters, necropolises (cemeteries), public baths, palaestras (gymnasiums), and fortresses to prove it. I’ve rarely had the opportunity to wander around ruins that are over two thousand years old, especially the ones that are the foundation of my own civilization. Here, in Turkey’s eastern Mediterranean coast – despite the mass tourism on the beach – we got those ancient sites all to ourselves.

Ok, so most of the ruins we visited were little-known sites. Elaiussa-Sebaste’s Roman theater, castle, church, and temple don’t draw in the tour busses. Adamkayalar, the reliefs carved onto a cliff face in the hills north of Kızkalesi, are amazing, but they require too steep a hike for most to reach. Anemurium, a sprawling coastal city 2,500 years old, is a regional highlight in our guide book, but when we wandered through its odeon and hamam, we were – amazingly – alone.

I didn’t forget to be thankful each time I got to wander through ruins without having to fight with the day-trippers for a view or wait for the big white tour busses to properly experience the aura of the place. Each westward kilometer we would drive, I knew we’d have to share the sites with more and more people, culminating at the hugely famous ruins of Ephesus – a must-see site that I was totally dreading to see.

Despite the sense of doom in our westward travel, driving along the coastal highway was pleasant. The hills were filled with boulders of limestone and marble, helping me to understand why ancient Greek and Roman architecture looked the way it did. Random ruins – decorated cave tombs, columns, building foundations – that weren’t in the guidebook popped up with astounding frequency. Agricultural villages (well, masses of plastic greenhouses, really) appeared in valleys and coves as we rounded each bend. And the landscape was beautifully green. I knew it was actually arid from walking through all the prickly and pointy bushes that week, but still, the lush green against the turquoise of the water and they grey of the boulders was such easy beauty to gaze at.

Eventually, our single-lane highway gave way to construction and then four lanes of traffic. Alanya, the tip of the Turkish Riviera, was approaching, and our brief reprieve from the downsides of the Mediterranean was over. We drove past endless kilometers of resorts, shops, and bars advertising things in Russian and German with prices in Euros and Dollars. We actually sat at a dead-stop in traffic for an hour as tourists did things in clothes that made me feel ashamed to be a westerner.

That day, we drove as absolutely far as we could, hoping to get out of this mass tourism nightmare. And just when I thought this was the way the rest of Turkey’s coast would be, we found a simple family-run campsite set on the only open kilometer of beach between luxury-hotel cities. As the plump old woman prepared us a healthy serving of Turkish food and her husband sat down at our picnic table for coffee and friendly chit-chat, I gazed at the sun setting over the Mediterranean and marvelled yet again at Turkey. It seemed that no matter what – illness, bad weather, mass tourism, horrible traffic, ugly development – this country would keep coming out smelling like a rose.