The 12 Islands of Gocek

Scattered across the sheltered bay off Göcek, a small harbour town in Turkey's Fethiye district on the Muğla coast, is a cluster of islets and coves that sailors know simply as the twelve islands. The number is a convention rather than a survey: depending on which rocks and headlands are counted, the tally shifts, but the group is always visited as a set, because the islands lie close enough together to be strung into a single day's sailing. Pine-covered slopes drop straight into water that stays flat in almost any wind, and the bay is effectively landlocked, which is what turned it into one of the busiest and best-loved cruising grounds on the Turkish coast.

Göcek, the Harbour Behind the Islands

Göcek itself is small, with about 4,987 residents at the 2022 count and a summer population that climbs past 7,000, and it sits at just five metres above sea level on the Dalaman to Fethiye road. In antiquity the place was called Callimache, occupying the coast between ancient Telmessos, now Fethiye, and Caunos near modern Dalyan; local tradition even claims this shore as the spot where Icarus came down. Until a reorganisation in 2013 it was a town in its own right, and it is now a neighbourhood of Fethiye municipality. For a settlement of its size it is extraordinarily well equipped for boats, with six marinas clustered around one bay: Club Marina, Skopea Marina, the municipal marinas, Marinturk Göcek Village Port, Marinturk Göcek Exclusive and D-Marin Göcek. Road access improved sharply with the 980-metre Göcek tunnel, opened in June 2006 as Turkey's first build-operate-transfer road project. The climate does the rest: average summer highs near 34°C, winter highs around 14°C, and more than 300 sunny days a year. The surrounding groves are known for tangerines, lemons and oranges.

Tersane, Yassıca and the Named Islands

Tersane Island is the largest of the group, a roughly triangular island of about 2.5 square kilometres, separated from neighbouring Domuz Island by a narrow channel. Its ancient Greek names were Telandria and Telandros, and ruins from the Lycian era survive on it; the Turkish name simply means "shipyard", earned when the sheltered bay was used for building and repairing vessels under the Ottomans. Its Greek villagers left after the population exchange agreed between Greece and Turkey in 1923, and their stone houses have stood empty ever since, roofless walls and doorways swallowed by scrub. The island is uninhabited today apart from a seasonal restaurant with its own quay. Of its three small bays the northwestern one gives the best protection, while the northeastern corner shelves to a very shallow harbour.

The Yassıca islets lie roughly five kilometres offshore from Göcek and are the postcard image of the bay: low, flat, linked by sandbanks and ringed by shallow turquoise water, with Büyük Yassıca the largest of them. Zeytin Island, also known as Hacı Halil Adası, is privately owned and covered in olive trees, and the Ottoman-era olive press on it is a reminder that these islands were lived on and worked long before yacht tourism arrived. Further out toward the mouth of the gulf, Kızılada, or Red Island, takes its name from the reddish rock and soil that glow at sunset. Its masonry lighthouse, a white cylinder 13 metres tall built by French engineers in 1910, is still in service; it was renovated in 2007 and now runs on wind power. Smaller inlets on the mainland side of the bay, such as Boynuzbükü, which is covered separately on this site, are usually folded into the same circuit.

A Protected Bay

What has kept the bay from being built over is a legal status dating to 1988, when the Turkish cabinet designated the Fethiye-Göcek Special Environmental Protection Area. The zone covers roughly 816 square kilometres, of which about 345 square kilometres are sea and 471 are land, with some 235 kilometres of coastline, and it carries archaeological protection as well. Inside Göcek the practical effect is visible at once: multi-storey buildings are prohibited, so the town has stayed low, green and small in a part of the coast where that has become rare. The same rules are the reason the islands themselves remain almost entirely undeveloped, with pine woodland running down to the waterline instead of hotel terraces.

Sailing the Twelve

The islands belong to the Turkish "Blue Voyage" tradition, which began in the summer of 1945, when the writer Cevat Şakir Kabaağaçlı, better known as Halikarnas Balıkçısı, took a group of friends along this coast in small fishing and sponge-diving boats. The name came from the circle of writers and painters around him, and Azra Erhat's book Mavi Yolculuk fixed it in the language in 1962. Today the same waters carry wooden gulets rather than sponge boats, and a loop through the islands is a classic stop on a Gocek blue cruise itinerary, usually taken as a single unhurried day out of one of the town's marinas. Because the distances between anchorages are measured in minutes rather than hours, the twelve islands suit crews who would rather swim, eat and go ashore than cover ground.