“Jason’s Headland”
On the Black Sea coast road between Bolaman and Ordu a short detour leads to Yason Burnu, a headland jutting out into the sea with a lighthouse at its tip. The approach to the headland is decorated with huge and hardly beautiful representations of the story of Jason, from whom it took its name.
The tale of Jason and the Argonauts is one of those which would once have been known to everyone but is perhaps less familiar today. Jason was the son of the king of Thessaly in Greece who had been overthrown by his brother, Pelias. When Jason appeared to recover his birthright, Pelias set him a task he assumed would be impossible to fulfil: to go in search of a Golden Fleece in a legendary place called Colchis (presumed to be in modern Georgia).
In pursuit of this goal, Jason assembled a crew made up of such famous heroes as Orpheus and Heracles, and set sail up the Bosphorus and along the Black Sea in a wooden ship called the Argo. In the course of their adventurous and ultimately successful voyage, the Argonauts will have sailed past Yason Burnu where a temple to Jason was later erected on a site now covered by a Greek Orthodox church dating back to 1869. The story of a successful attempt to replicate the voyage in modern times is told in Tim Severin’s The Jason Voyage.
Not so long ago it would have been possible to stand on the headland, gaze out to sea and dream about the story of the Argonauts in a setting that felt appropriately isolated. Unfortunately the local authorities decided that the site would be “improved” by the provision of a string of lampposts that run right out from the church to the lighthouse thereby obliterating its erstwhile natural beauty.
Transport info
To get to Yason Burnu from Ordu take a minibus to Perşembe or Fatsa and change.
