Can Yucel Poem Cafe

At the entrance to Eski Datca, the old quarter of the Datca peninsula in Mugla province, a modest village coffeehouse has become one of the town's best-known literary landmarks. Known locally as Orhan's Cafe after the former mayor who kept it, it was the favourite haunt of the Turkish poet Can Yucel, who spent his final years living nearby and died in Datca on 12 August 1999, nine days short of his seventy-third birthday. Shaded by old trees and largely unchanged in appearance, the cafe still keeps the table where he used to sit.

The Poet Who Chose Datca

Can Yucel was born in Istanbul on 21 August 1926, the son of Hasan Ali Yucel, the Minister of National Education who oversaw the great Turkish translation programme of the 1940s and the founding of the Village Institutes. His own grandfather had been an Ottoman sea captain lost with the frigate Ertugrul. He studied Latin and Ancient Greek at Ankara University and later at Cambridge, worked as a translator at several embassies, and spent five years in the Turkish section of the BBC in London before returning to Turkey in 1958. For a time he worked as a tourist guide in Bodrum and Marmaris, which is how he first came to know this coast.

He was imprisoned more than once for the political sharpness of his verse, and the tone of his work — irreverent, obscene when it wanted to be, tender without warning — made him one of the most quoted and least respectable figures in modern Turkish poetry. The collections run from Sevgi Duvari (1973) and Bir Siyasinin Siirleri (1974) through Olum ve Oglum (1976), Gokyokus (1984) and Canfeda (1988), to the volume published in the year of his death, Mekanim Datca Olsun — "let my home be Datca". Internationally he is probably better known as a translator, having brought Shakespeare, Federico Garcia Lorca and Bertolt Brecht into Turkish in versions that read as rewritings as much as translations.

Inside Orhan's Cafe

The cafe had been the village's gathering place long before Yucel arrived, and that is precisely what drew him: he came here to sit and talk with the people who actually lived in Eski Datca, not with visitors. After his death the owner set aside a corner of the room to him, and it is still there — photographs, portraits, handwritten verses and clippings pinned across the wall, along with personal odds and ends from his years in the town. The most-photographed object in the room is a half-finished bottle of wine, left standing exactly as he last put it down.

Nothing about the place is curated in a museum sense. It remains a working village coffeehouse, with the same plastic chairs and tea glasses it has always had, which is a large part of why people keep coming. The cafe stands a short walk from the stone house where Yucel lived and from his grave in the Datca municipal cemetery, whose striking monument was designed by the sculptor Mehmet Aksoy; it was vandalised and destroyed in August 2011, then rebuilt.

Eski Datca Around the Cafe

The village itself repays an unhurried hour. Eski Datca and neighbouring Resadiye are among the few old settlements on this coast to have survived largely intact: narrow lanes, whitewashed stone houses, bougainvillea over the walls and almond trees in the courtyards. This was the peninsula's principal village until 1947, when the district centre was moved down to the harbour at Iskele, and the resulting decades of obscurity are the reason so little of it was rebuilt. The name Resadiye dates from the reign of the late Ottoman sultan Mehmed Resad; the older name Datca returned under the Republic. The peninsula's almonds, several varieties of which are endemic to it, are still the local speciality.

Since Datca is also a regular call on the Aegean sailing routes that bring visitors down this coast, many gulet cruises in Turkey call in here, giving passengers a chance to see the human side of a peninsula otherwise known mainly for its beaches, its almonds and the ruins of Knidos at its western tip.