Mazi Bay

Mazi is a village on the northern shore of the Gulf of Gokova, just outside the Bodrum peninsula, and it is one of those places that makes more sense from the water than from the road. Eight bays open one after another below the village, most of them with no vehicle access at all, which is why sailors know Mazi as a list of anchorages while drivers know it as a turning off the airport road.

The drive from Bodrum

Mazi lies roughly 53 km from the centre of Bodrum and about 61 km from Milas, which works out at some 45 minutes behind the wheel. You take the Bodrum-Milas airport road and turn off at the Guvercinlik junction towards Mumcular, then continue through the village and down towards the coast. The character of the road changes quickly once you leave the junction: the resort strip gives way to pine forest and smallholdings, sea views open on the descent, and the traffic thins to tractors and the occasional flock crossing.

The bays of Lower Mazi

Lower Mazi is the part that matters to boats. Eight bays are strung along the coastline, several of them deep and sheltered enough to hold a gulet overnight, and most of them are best reached during a Bodrum gulet cruise rather than by car, since there is no road down to the water and the swimming is off the deck.

• Hurma: calm water and easy holding, which makes it a standard lunch stop and a common overnight anchorage.
• Ince Yali: shallow and sandy close in, so it suits families and anyone who wants to stand up in the water rather than tread it.
• Kissebuku: the most interesting of the eight, and the largest. Broad enough to take a crowd of boats and well protected. Ashore, among the scrub, are the ruins of the Byzantine settlement known as Anastasiapolis, with a basilica, a cistern and a bathhouse still traceable. Like much of the Carian coast, it was abandoned as raiding intensified, and by the middle Byzantine period it was largely empty.
• Sedef: a small enclosed cove backed by pine, greener and quieter than the rest, with the water shading from blue to green over the seagrass.

Cakilli Yali and Ilgin fill out the sequence on either side, both shallower and used mostly as day stops. What the eight share is clear water, pine coming right down to the shoreline and no development to speak of, which leaves swimming, snorkelling and kayaking as the whole programme. One practical note: in July and August the meltemi normally freshens through the afternoon and eases off at night, so crews tend to sail the exposed legs early and be settled in a bay before the wind builds.

Fish, olive oil and the morning market

Mazi eats the way small Aegean villages eat. Mezes are built on local olive oil and garden vegetables, and the fish is whatever came in overnight. Boats land the night's catch on the beach in the morning and the small market that follows is the busiest half hour of the village day; barbun (red mullet) and akya (leerfish) are among the names you will hear. Grilled over charcoal with nothing much added is the standard treatment, and there is no reason to improve on it.

The looms

Carpet weaving is still a working craft here rather than a display for visitors. Many houses keep a loom, and the village weaves in the Milas manner, in cream, brown and yellow, with wool dyed in boiling pots using plant roots. The skill passes down at home, mostly among the women of the family, and you are as likely to come across it by hearing a loom through an open door as by going looking for it.

Why the village sits above the sea

Mazi is built well back from the shoreline, on higher ground, and the bays below carry no settlement. Local accounts explain this the way most of this coast does: villages were kept out of sight of the water so that passing corsairs had nothing obvious to raid, and the coves were left to fishermen who could pull their boats out and disappear inland. Whatever the exact history, the pattern is consistent along the whole Gokova shore, and it is the reason the bays are still empty today.

What to expect

There are a handful of restaurants and very little else. No resort strip, no nightlife, no organised anything. What Mazi has is coastline: mountains holding green cover all the way down to an emerald shore, a run of eight bays you could spend a week working through, and enough quiet that the loudest thing most afternoons is the wind in the pines. An hour from Bodrum, that is the entire point.