The Round House, Omer’s Houses, Dalyan, 4th July
A trip to Koycegiz, which is about 30km upstream from here at the end of Koycegiz Lake, Turkey’s deepest lake and reputedly visited by over 150 species of birds. It’s an ordinary little town (or large village), the sort of place where local people, mostly farmers and fishing folk, would buy a washing machine, reels of cotton and a billhook, where they might find a solicitor or a vet. Souvenir stalls languished on the square, between a minaret at one end and a lion fountain at the other. The restaurants and boats along the quay, also hotels with pools, looked like impositions, not part of the bones of the community. It felt like a place where nothing much happens, and all the better for that.
Today Koycegiz was going about its everyday business; the lakeside restaurants and boats were deserted. Still air hung thickly over the polished pewter of the lake – only skimming swallows and house martins broke the surface. In the distance blue hills rose from the water where the natural channel, the Dalyan Delta, runs into the Mediterranean. At one o’clock a blissfully cooling breeze sprung up off the lake whipping the surface into wavelets and setting the boats dancing and the umbrellas and canopies slapping.