Row upon row of featureless summer houses with piles of builders’ rubble abandoned in between them. A giant branch of the cut-price supermarket Bim. Litter gently billowing in the wind. Doesn’t sound too appealing, does it, but this is the seaside resort of Enez on the Gulf of Saros, about as far west in Turkey as you can get without crossing the border into Greece.
Cut. Rewind a bit. Because of course if that was all there was to it then Enez couldn’t be the popular summer escape for Turkish families that it quite clearly is. The explanation lies in the never-ending stretch of beach that puts out tentacles in both directions. Forty kilometres of sand in all, and you can’t say fairer than that.
Still, few foreigners are going to be lured away from the bright lights and familiar comforts of the Aegean and Mediterranean without more of a carrot than that. For them the good news is that there are actually two Enezes coexisting side by side like an ill-matched couple whose relationship has gone sour, and it’s the other Enez, the quieter Enez that struggles to rustle up a single hotel, that is likely to be of most interest to visitors.
For Enez read Ainos
The second Enez (really the first one since the beach resort is less than a decade old) stands on the site of an ancient settlement called Ainos that seems to have been established around 4,000 BC. This was later occupied by Greek colonists, then by the Persians and Romans, but its glory days came under the Byzantines when a massive basilica dedicated to Divine Wisdom (Haghia Sophia) was erected here. Later Enez was seized by the Ottomans whereupon the church became a mosque, with a mihrab slotted into its south aisle and its walls deftly repainted.
Ainos’ primary attraction had been its location at the point where the Meriç river emptied into the sea. This made it perfect for traders, including the Genoese who established a colony here, but as at Ephesus the harbour gradually silted up, leaving the town stranded some four kilometres inland. The result was inevitable. By the time the Ottomans rode in in 1456 the town had already lost its raison d’etre. The resort may be hellish tacky to look at but at least it’s brought renewed life to the area, at least until the summer draws to a close.
The sight circuit
The great thing about a visit to Enez is that it’s small and compact, with the things to see handily grouped together. The most unmissable sight is the medieval castle with the great basilica-turned-mosque tucked up inside it. On-going excavations have uncovered extraordinary rock-cut depots beneath the later buildings as well as what must have been a delightful sixth-century chapel with a wonderful marble floor. Surprisingly, given how little is said about Enez, most of the castle’s walls are still standing as are a series of peripheral towers, the largest of which once housed the local mint.
Also worth a look is a doll’s house of a church which was press-ganged into service as a burial place for Has Yunus Bey, the Ottoman commander who captured Ainos, then died shortly afterwards. The church looks as if it’s drifted across the border from Greece, although Ottoman tombs of the beturbanned sort that can be seen along İstanbul’s Divan Yolu are jostling each other for position by the entrance.
To tick off Enez’s third main attraction you need to venture into the wasteland of summer houses which lies across a small lagoon to the east. There the Sahil Kervansarayı, a long, thin barracks erected in Ottoman times, continued in business right into the First World War. It would be a fine sight were it not surrounded by ugly modern development.
Sunflowers with everything
If you’ve ever wondered where all the sunflower seeds that rural Turks like to crunch with their tea come from, then look no further than western Thrace where field after endless field is planted with ayçiçekler (moonflowers). In fact this is a surprisingly bucolic corner of the country, with traffic frequently forced to give way to slow-moving herds of cows, and flocks of sheep and goats. Unlikely as it might seem, this is also a part of the world where the donkey cart is up there with the Volvo as the favoured mode of transport with the locals.
Hotel desert
The biggest snag with a trip to Enez is that if you don’t own a summer house there you’ll be struggling to find somewhere to stay. The Hotel Ege in Enez Mark One features a fine line in mothball-scented bathrooms, while the Golden Beach Hotel in Enez Mark Two asks a fortune for a room overlooking a half-built housing development. That leaves Keşan, an hour’s drive inland, which offers some typical city-centre business hotels. But then you could just travel out there for the day and be back in İstanbul in time for tea…
The great summer migration
Enez is a prime example of a Turkish phenomenon that will strike some visitors as extremely odd. Every year the schools have barely closed their doors for the three-month vacation before half the country ups sticks and migrates en masse to summer houses (yazlıks) by the sea. It’s a migration with a long history and one that proved lucrative for the Princes Islands even in the 19th century. But once upon a time only the well-heeled could afford to indulge in such journeying. Now the middle classes can also manage second homes by the sea, with the result that whole swathes of coastline have disappeared beneath concrete not to provide hotels for foreign tourists but to provide yazlıks for locals.
Maybe it’s something to do with the ancestral nomadism that supposedly lingers in the Turkish soul, a yearning to recreate the old annual movement up to the yaylas (plateaus) in search of better pastures. Who knows. The one thing that’s certain is that a move to the yazlık holds out no prospect of a holiday for the women of the household who must continue their round of domestic drudgery, just in a different setting.
