Ekincik Bay

Ekincik Bay lies on the northern shore of the Gulf of Köyceğiz, roughly midway between Marmaris and the town of Köyceğiz, and is best known as the sea gateway to the Dalyan river and the ancient city of Kaunos. Cruising guides put it about 18 nautical miles east of Marmaris and describe it as the only properly sheltered anchorage on the long run of coast between Marmaris and the Gulf of Fethiye. Steep wooded slopes drop to a beach of sand mixed with fine gravel, and the water close inshore is calm and shallow enough to make swimming easy, which is why almost every gulet working this coast puts in here at least once.

The Anchorage and the Village

The bay offers two distinct anchoring areas. Depths run to roughly 8 to 15 metres over a sand bottom that holds well, and the north-eastern corner gives the best protection when the summer meltemi is blowing, at the cost of being the busiest. A quay with laid moorings, water and electricity was built by the restaurant on the eastern side and takes around 20 yachts; a second pier, run by the local boat cooperative, berths up to fifteen. On shore the settlement is deliberately small: a few pensions, grocery shops and fish restaurants that live off passing boats rather than package tourism. There is no fuel station, and diesel is brought in by tanker truck from Köyceğiz, some 35 kilometres away by road.

Up the River to Kaunos

Yachts rarely enter the river themselves. The trip upstream is made in the shallow-draught boats of the local cooperative, which thread through reed beds towards Dalyan, and the ruins of Kaunos stand above the water on the way. It was a Carian city, and the oldest datable object found there, the neck of a Protogeometric amphora, belongs to the 9th century BC. Herodotus records that the Persian general Harpagus took the place in 546 BC after fierce resistance, while its imposing walls date from the reign of the satrap Mausolus in the 4th century BC. Kaunos traded salt, salted fish, dried figs, pine resin and black mastic through two harbours, and from around 200 BC the silting delta gradually cut it off from the sea; the site now lies about 8 kilometres inland. The theatre, some 75 metres across and seating around 5,000, survives in good condition, and the acropolis rises 152 metres above the plain. A malaria epidemic in the 15th century finished the town off, and excavation only began in 1966 under Professor Baki Öğün.

The cliffs above the river carry roughly 150 rock-cut tombs, six of them worked into full temple façades with Ionic columns and pediments between the 4th and 2nd centuries BC. They are frequently described as Lycian, but the river marked the old boundary and the site sits on the Carian side of it; the tombs are Carian work borrowing Greek temple forms.

İztuzu Beach and the Delta

Where the river meets the sea, İztuzu Beach runs for 4.5 kilometres as a narrow spit separating the fresh water of the delta from the Mediterranean. It is one of the sea's most important nesting grounds for loggerhead turtles, with around 300 nests counted in a typical year. In 1987 work started on an 1,800-bed hotel here; an international campaign led by the resident June Haimoff and the botanist David Bellamy, backed by the WWF, stopped it, and in July 1988 the beach and its hinterland were declared the Köyceğiz-Dalyan Special Environmental Protection Area. The sand is still closed to the public between 20:00 and 08:00 through the May-to-October nesting season, and a rescue centre for injured turtles has operated there since 2008. Behind it lies Köyceğiz Lake, 5,200 hectares of brackish water 20 to 60 metres deep, fed by sulphurous hot springs at Sultaniye on its southern shore.

Fitting Ekincik Into a Cruise

Because the river trip takes the better part of a day, boats usually stay the night, which makes Ekincik a classic stop on a Marmaris blue cruise itinerary rather than a lunch halt. The name Dalyan itself means fishing weir, after the traps still set in the channel to catch the sea bass, mullet and bream that return from the lake, a reminder that the delta was a working place long before it became a protected one.