At the entrance to Kıyıkızlacık, near Milas, a man has set up a kokoreç stand to grill lamb entrails for passers-by. It strikes me as a strange thing to be cooking in temperatures of over 100 degrees but no doubt he knows his potential clientele. In any case, he’s a welcoming soul.
“Come in! Sit down in the shade,” he says pointing to the many chairs hopefully bunched up around a table in his little booth.
Earlier in the day I’d missed my stop and ended up miles up the coast in a grubby little beach resort called Zeytinlikuyu. Now I’m scared that I’ll miss the bus back to Milas if I’m not standing in the middle of the road to flag it down. But his enthusiasm wins me over. I sit down beside one of the large Turkish flags embossed with a picture of Atatürk that have become all the rage since the Gezi Park protests of the summer.
“It seems very quiet,” I say to him. “How’s tourism doing?”
“Terrible. It’s finished.” He screws up his face in disgust.
“Do you mean now or generally?”
“Generally. This place used to be heaving with tourists. The bay was full of boats. The tourists were shoulder to shoulder. Now look at it.”
It certainly does seem disconcertingly quiet. Just minutes before I had had the wonderful ruins of the İasos acropolis entirely to myself. One could perhaps argue that only a lunatic would have been hacking about the hillside in the middle of the day but even at the bottom of the hill in the huge agora there were only three people wandering around other than me, and one of them turned out to be a cowherd rounding up beasts that had strayed into the ruins.
I wonder if it’s the expansion of Bodrum that’s done for the tourists or whether the village is just too remote. Not that that seems to have stopped the second-home builders who have saddled the surrounding area with block after desolate block of identikit holiday homes.
“Why do you think that is?”
“No one looking after things. No one doing anything,” he complains, and I remember Zeytinlikuyu as I’d glimpsed it on a quick stroll while waiting for the return bus in the morning. In theory it was a lovely little bay but to my amazement people had been sitting on the beach with nothing but a low stone wall separating them from the local rubbish dump.
“There was certainly a lot of garbage in Zeytinlikuyu…”
“Yes! Disgusting. Every morning I clear up all around here. It’s not my job but I want things clean.”
We sit in companionable silence for a few moments pondering the problems of Kıyıkızlacık.
Then: “What’s your name?” he asks, cheering up again.
“Pat.”
“I’m Kemal, after Atatürk,” and he points at the flag with a grin.
“The prime minister said we shouldn’t use those flags,” I venture.
“Boş ver! He’s finished anyway.”
“We’ll go straight to jail if you say that, you know…”
“He’s finished. Finished!”
“But there’s nobody else…” I’m just starting to say when fortunately the bus rounds the corner and I can rush to board it before tempers grow hotter than the coals burning under the kokoreç grill.
Written: 7 October 2013
Some get to enjoy the rubbish
