Datca Old Town

Eski Datça, or Datça Old Town, is the older settlement set slightly inland from the harbour that now serves as the district's main town on the Datça Peninsula in Muğla province. It lies about three kilometres back from the water, close enough to walk from the quay and far enough to feel like a different place: narrow, largely car-free lanes, low stone houses in walled gardens, and bougainvillea over most of the walls. Until 1947 the peninsula's administrative centre was actually the nearby village of Reşadiye; only afterwards did the seat move to the harbour quarter, leaving the old stone-built neighbourhood to quietly empty out. By the 1980s much of Eski Datça stood close to abandonment, its lanes and Mediterranean-style houses left to the weather.

How the Old Town Was Left Behind

Datça's administrative history explains a good deal about the shape of the place. The area was only a nahiye, a sub-district, of Marmaris until 1928, and when it became a district in its own right the centre stayed inland at Reşadiye, where the population and the farmland were. The move to the coast came later, with the road and the boats. Today's town of Datça is really three quarters stitched together — Reşadiye, Eski Datça and İskele, the harbour quarter that now holds most of the shops, hotels and restaurants. The district as a whole covers 436 square kilometres and counted just over 25,000 residents at the 2022 census, which by the standards of the Aegean coast is very few.

That decline has since reversed. The old houses, many built from local stone with small courtyard gardens, have been restored rather than replaced, and the lanes are now lined with shops, cafés and restaurants instead of standing derelict. The traditional pattern is easy to read once you notice it: one or two storeys at most, thick masonry of undressed local stone, a courtyard with an almond or fig tree, and a street frontage that gives away almost nothing about what lies behind it. The neighbourhood is a protected conservation area, which is why restoration here has meant repairing what was there rather than rebuilding it in concrete.

Can Yücel and the Town's Literary Turn

The town's best-known modern resident was the poet Can Yücel, born in Istanbul in 1926 and the son of Hasan Âli Yücel, the education minister behind Turkey's great translation programme of the 1940s. Can Yücel was himself a translator of Shakespeare, Lorca and Brecht as well as a poet, jailed more than once for his politics, and he spent his last years in a modest stone house in Eski Datça. He died there in August 1999 and is buried in the town; his final collection carried the title Mekânım Datça Olsun, which translates roughly as "let my place be Datça". The house is now a small museum and a nearby street carries his name, and the association has drawn a steady trickle of visitors interested in the town's literary history as much as its architecture.

The Peninsula Around It

The wider Datça Peninsula stretches close to 100 kilometres between the Aegean and the Mediterranean, narrowing at one point to an isthmus only a few hundred metres across. It is dry, pine-covered and thinly built up, in large part because the Datça–Bozburun peninsula was declared a Special Environmental Protection Area in 1990, a designation that has kept the mass development seen on neighbouring stretches of coast at bay. Its agriculture runs to olives, valonia oak and above all almonds, which turn up locally as oil, as sweets and as a paste sold in the shops of the old town. Over the past decade or so the peninsula has also become known as a rock-climbing destination, thanks to its limestone bluffs and pine-backed coastline.

Knidos and Arriving by Sea

At the far western tip, roughly 35 kilometres from town at a headland now called Tekir, stand the ruins of Knidos. It was a Dorian city and part of the six-city league that also included Halicarnassus, Kos and three cities on Rhodes; a causeway out to an offshore island split the channel into two harbours, the larger of them closed by substantial moles. Knidos produced Eudoxus the astronomer, Ctesias the historian and Sostratus, credited with building the Pharos of Alexandria, and it commissioned from Praxiteles the Aphrodite of Knidos, the most celebrated statue of the ancient world and now lost. Charles Newton excavated the site in 1857 and 1858, and the colossal marble lion he removed from a tomb there is in the British Museum.

For travellers arriving by sea, the old town's calm streets make an easy contrast to a day on the water, and Eski Datça is worth a visit if you're chartering a gulet in Turkey, whether for a slow lunch or simply a walk away from the boat. The walk in from the harbour takes half an hour or so, and for anyone coming overland there is a car ferry from Bodrum to Körmen, ten kilometres northwest of the town. Little here is signposted and there is not much to see in the museum sense; the point is the lanes themselves, the stone, and the almond trees behind the garden walls.