Datça
Encyclopedia
Datça is a district of Muğla Province
in south-west Turkey
, and the center town of the district. The center is situated midway through the peninsula which carries the same name as the district and the town (Datça Peninsula
).
of a small panhandle in the direction of the south-east. The isthmus itself is wide only of several hundred meters.
The extreme end of the western tip of the district and the peninsula, the locality called Tekir, is the location of the ancient city of Knidos
. There is an ongoing debate on whether or not this location was the original site of the ancient city, a number of sources claiming that until the mid-4th century BCE, Knidos was halfway along the peninsula, near the present-day district center.
The peninsula's eastern end is marked by the fjord
-like indentation of Bencik Cove, 1.5 km in length, at the end of which the narrow isthmus where it joins the mainland is found. This point is a natural curiosity which offers a wide view of the Gulf of Gökova
in the north and the Gulf of Hisarönü in the south and is called Balıkaşıran (literally, the place where fish may leap across) and is also often used for the portage of small boats.
Sultan Mehmed V
Reşad, and some maps may still refer to the peninsula under this name. Today, Reşadiye is the name of one of the quarters of the town along with Eski Datça (literally "Old Datça") and İskele ("the quay") quarters, each separated from the others by a distance of about a mile to form, taken as a whole, the town of Datça proper. Reşadiye quarter was the original administrative core was located when the town was renamed Datça and turned into a district center in 1928, before it was moved to İskele quarter. The center town is crossed by the short course of the Datça Stream (Datça Çayı in Turkish
).
Datça has nine villages scattered along the peninsula. These are; Cumalı, Emecik, Hızırşah, Karaköy, Kızlan, Mesudiye
, Sındı, Yakaköy, Yazıköy. Historically, apart from small coastal patches, Datça Peninsula has two fertile areas along its length. The whole of the eastern half is bare, mountainous and scarcely inhabited. The western part is also mountainous, rising in places over 1,000 meters, but has towards its western end on the south side a considerable extent of well-watered land reaching to the coast at Palamutbükü locality and supporting a group of villages known collectively as Betçe (the five villages). These are; Mesudiye
, Sındı, Yakaköy, Yazıköy, Cumalı. The village of Mesudiye
, very near the sea shore has a jetty owned by the community of villagers. The village's bay is called Hayıtbükü. Palamutbükü locality, more to the west, also has a little pier which allows boats to moore. Palamutbükü today is a holiday village with a long beach.
The second and larger area of good land is in the middle of the peninsula southwest of the median isthmus dividing the two halves and centered around the town of Datça. The region's promising potential was noted already in the 1880s by the hydrographer
Thomas Abel B. Spratt in the following terms:
A point of note on the general settlement pattern of these villages is that the locations chosen were never in the immediate coastline, but always at a mile's distance or more from the sea and at a relatively safe altitude on the slopes of a hill. The reason was from times immemorial was the fear of pirates, advantaged as they were by the intricate geology of shores of southwestern Turkey and of the many islands and islets that are its natural extensions, in an environment not unlike that of the Caribbean Sea
. Piracy remained a serious security problem well until the beginning of the 20th century and especially during the weakening of the Ottoman Empire
and the issue often necessitated foreign intervention.
, especially by sea, because of the beauty of its many coves and larger bays, which are favored ports of call for those undertaking the celebrated Blue Cruise
along Turkey
's spectacular southwest coast. Boats (usually gulet
s) depart either from Bodrum
or Marmaris
, or from Datça itself for these tours.
The road from Marmaris to Datça may still be a little bumpy in some parts, and winds along a fauna that gradually but strikingly differs from that of the mainland.
Apart from the traditional settlements, there are also a dozen recently constructed vacation villages in the peninsula. The balance between preserving the natural way of life and fauna
and investing in large-scale infrastructures for the tourism industry is a vividly ongoing debate for Datça, as for the entire region of southwestern Turkey. The inhabitants of the Datça peninsula have shown themselves clearly opposed to gigantism and are in favor of developing the tourism potential of the region through family pensions and inns and small hotels well integrated into their environment, while governments in the past displayed approaches to the debate in mere foreign exchange entry terms.
, Datça is associated with the poet and the accomplished translator (notably of Shakespeare) Can Yücel
who spent the last decades of his life in Datça and is also buried here.
Mugla Province
Muğla Province is a province of Turkey, at the country's south-western corner, on the Aegean Sea. Its seat is Muğla, about inland, while some of Turkey's largest holiday resorts, such as Bodrum, Ölüdeniz, Marmaris and Fethiye, are on the coast in Muğla....
in south-west Turkey
Turkey
Turkey , known officially as the Republic of Turkey , is a Eurasian country located in Western Asia and in East Thrace in Southeastern Europe...
, and the center town of the district. The center is situated midway through the peninsula which carries the same name as the district and the town (Datça Peninsula
Datça Peninsula
The Datça Peninsula is an 80 km-long, narrow peninsula in southwest Turkey separating the Gulf of Gökova to the north from the Gulf of Hisarönü to the south. The peninsula corresponds almost exactly to the administrative district of Datça, part of Muğla Province...
).
Geography
The long and narrow Datça Peninsula, whose outline follows the ondulations of small bays and coves facing south or north all along its length which reaches near 100 km (62 mi), corresponds almost exactly to Datça district area, with the addition beyond its isthmusIsthmus
An isthmus is a narrow strip of land connecting two larger land areas usually with waterforms on either side.Canals are often built through isthmuses where they may be particularly advantageous to create a shortcut for marine transportation...
of a small panhandle in the direction of the south-east. The isthmus itself is wide only of several hundred meters.
The extreme end of the western tip of the district and the peninsula, the locality called Tekir, is the location of the ancient city of Knidos
Knidos
Knidos or Cnidus is an ancient settlement located in Turkey. It was an ancient Greek city of Caria, part of the Dorian Hexapolis. It was situated on the Datça peninsula, which forms the southern side of the Sinus Ceramicus, now known as Gulf of Gökova. By the fourth century BC, Knidos was located...
. There is an ongoing debate on whether or not this location was the original site of the ancient city, a number of sources claiming that until the mid-4th century BCE, Knidos was halfway along the peninsula, near the present-day district center.
The peninsula's eastern end is marked by the fjord
Fjord
Geologically, a fjord is a long, narrow inlet with steep sides or cliffs, created in a valley carved by glacial activity.-Formation:A fjord is formed when a glacier cuts a U-shaped valley by abrasion of the surrounding bedrock. Glacial melting is accompanied by rebound of Earth's crust as the ice...
-like indentation of Bencik Cove, 1.5 km in length, at the end of which the narrow isthmus where it joins the mainland is found. This point is a natural curiosity which offers a wide view of the Gulf of Gökova
Gulf of Gökova
Gulf of Gökova or Gulf of Kerme , is a long , narrow gulf of the Aegean Sea between Bodrum Peninsula and Datça Peninsula in south-west Turkey.Administratively, Gulf of Gökova coastline includes portions of the districts of, clockwise, Bodrum, Milas,...
in the north and the Gulf of Hisarönü in the south and is called Balıkaşıran (literally, the place where fish may leap across) and is also often used for the portage of small boats.
Settlement
Both the town and the peninsula were called Reşadiye for a brief period in the beginning of the 20th century, in honor of the penultimate OttomanOttoman Empire
The Ottoman EmpireIt was usually referred to as the "Ottoman Empire", the "Turkish Empire", the "Ottoman Caliphate" or more commonly "Turkey" by its contemporaries...
Sultan Mehmed V
Mehmed V
Mehmed V Reshad was the 35th Ottoman Sultan. He was the son of Sultan Abdülmecid I. He was succeeded by his half-brother Mehmed VI.-Birth:...
Reşad, and some maps may still refer to the peninsula under this name. Today, Reşadiye is the name of one of the quarters of the town along with Eski Datça (literally "Old Datça") and İskele ("the quay") quarters, each separated from the others by a distance of about a mile to form, taken as a whole, the town of Datça proper. Reşadiye quarter was the original administrative core was located when the town was renamed Datça and turned into a district center in 1928, before it was moved to İskele quarter. The center town is crossed by the short course of the Datça Stream (Datça Çayı in Turkish
Turkish language
Turkish is a language spoken as a native language by over 83 million people worldwide, making it the most commonly spoken of the Turkic languages. Its speakers are located predominantly in Turkey and Northern Cyprus with smaller groups in Iraq, Greece, Bulgaria, the Republic of Macedonia, Kosovo,...
).
Mesudiye, Datça
Mesudiye is a small village of Muğla Province in the Aegean region of Turkey. It is located in the Datça Peninsula where the Mediterranean embraces the Aegean Sea. The population of the village is about 700....
, Sındı, Yakaköy, Yazıköy. Historically, apart from small coastal patches, Datça Peninsula has two fertile areas along its length. The whole of the eastern half is bare, mountainous and scarcely inhabited. The western part is also mountainous, rising in places over 1,000 meters, but has towards its western end on the south side a considerable extent of well-watered land reaching to the coast at Palamutbükü locality and supporting a group of villages known collectively as Betçe (the five villages). These are; Mesudiye
Mesudiye, Datça
Mesudiye is a small village of Muğla Province in the Aegean region of Turkey. It is located in the Datça Peninsula where the Mediterranean embraces the Aegean Sea. The population of the village is about 700....
, Sındı, Yakaköy, Yazıköy, Cumalı. The village of Mesudiye
Mesudiye, Datça
Mesudiye is a small village of Muğla Province in the Aegean region of Turkey. It is located in the Datça Peninsula where the Mediterranean embraces the Aegean Sea. The population of the village is about 700....
, very near the sea shore has a jetty owned by the community of villagers. The village's bay is called Hayıtbükü. Palamutbükü locality, more to the west, also has a little pier which allows boats to moore. Palamutbükü today is a holiday village with a long beach.
The second and larger area of good land is in the middle of the peninsula southwest of the median isthmus dividing the two halves and centered around the town of Datça. The region's promising potential was noted already in the 1880s by the hydrographer
Hydrography
Hydrography is the measurement of the depths, the tides and currents of a body of water and establishment of the sea, river or lake bed topography and morphology. Normally and historically for the purpose of charting a body of water for the safe navigation of shipping...
Thomas Abel B. Spratt in the following terms:
A point of note on the general settlement pattern of these villages is that the locations chosen were never in the immediate coastline, but always at a mile's distance or more from the sea and at a relatively safe altitude on the slopes of a hill. The reason was from times immemorial was the fear of pirates, advantaged as they were by the intricate geology of shores of southwestern Turkey and of the many islands and islets that are its natural extensions, in an environment not unlike that of the Caribbean Sea
Caribbean Sea
The Caribbean Sea is a sea of the Atlantic Ocean located in the tropics of the Western hemisphere. It is bounded by Mexico and Central America to the west and southwest, to the north by the Greater Antilles, and to the east by the Lesser Antilles....
. Piracy remained a serious security problem well until the beginning of the 20th century and especially during the weakening of the Ottoman Empire
Ottoman Empire
The Ottoman EmpireIt was usually referred to as the "Ottoman Empire", the "Turkish Empire", the "Ottoman Caliphate" or more commonly "Turkey" by its contemporaries...
and the issue often necessitated foreign intervention.
Tourism
Datça Peninsula is a prized location for tourists visiting TurkeyTurkey
Turkey , known officially as the Republic of Turkey , is a Eurasian country located in Western Asia and in East Thrace in Southeastern Europe...
, especially by sea, because of the beauty of its many coves and larger bays, which are favored ports of call for those undertaking the celebrated Blue Cruise
Blue Cruise
A Blue Cruise, also known as a Blue Voyage , is a term used for recreational voyages along the Turkish Riviera, on Turkey's southwestern coast...
along Turkey
Turkey
Turkey , known officially as the Republic of Turkey , is a Eurasian country located in Western Asia and in East Thrace in Southeastern Europe...
's spectacular southwest coast. Boats (usually gulet
Gulet
A gulet is a traditional design of a two-masted wooden sailing vessel from the south-west coast of Turkey, although similar vessels can be found all around the eastern Mediterranean. Today this type of vessel, varying in size from 14 to 35 metres, is popular for tourist charters...
s) depart either from Bodrum
Bodrum
Bodrum is a port city in Muğla Province, in the southwestern Aegean Region of Turkey. It is located on the southern coast of Bodrum Peninsula, at a point that checks the entry into the Gulf of Gökova. The site was called Halicarnassus of Caria in ancient times and was famous for housing the...
or Marmaris
Marmaris
Marmaris is a port city and a tourist resort on the Mediterranean coast, located in southwest Turkey, in Muğla Province.Marmaris' main source of income is tourism. Little is left of the sleepy fishing village that Marmaris was just a few decades ago after a construction boom in the 1980s...
, or from Datça itself for these tours.
The road from Marmaris to Datça may still be a little bumpy in some parts, and winds along a fauna that gradually but strikingly differs from that of the mainland.
Fauna
Fauna or faunæ is all of the animal life of any particular region or time. The corresponding term for plants is flora.Zoologists and paleontologists use fauna to refer to a typical collection of animals found in a specific time or place, e.g. the "Sonoran Desert fauna" or the "Burgess shale fauna"...
and investing in large-scale infrastructures for the tourism industry is a vividly ongoing debate for Datça, as for the entire region of southwestern Turkey. The inhabitants of the Datça peninsula have shown themselves clearly opposed to gigantism and are in favor of developing the tourism potential of the region through family pensions and inns and small hotels well integrated into their environment, while governments in the past displayed approaches to the debate in mere foreign exchange entry terms.
Notable natives
In Turkish literatureTurkish literature
Turkish literature comprises both oral compositions and written texts in the Turkish language, either in its Ottoman form or in less exclusively literary forms, such as that spoken in the Republic of Turkey today...
, Datça is associated with the poet and the accomplished translator (notably of Shakespeare) Can Yücel
Can Yücel
Can Yücel was a Turkish poet noted for his use of colloquial language.-Biography:Can Yücel was the son of a former Minister of National Education, Hasan Ali Yücel who left his mark on the history of education in Turkey, and a grandchild of an Ottoman sea captain who perished with the frigate...
who spent the last decades of his life in Datça and is also buried here.
See also
- Mesudiye, DatçaMesudiye, DatçaMesudiye is a small village of Muğla Province in the Aegean region of Turkey. It is located in the Datça Peninsula where the Mediterranean embraces the Aegean Sea. The population of the village is about 700....
- Datça PeninsulaDatça PeninsulaThe Datça Peninsula is an 80 km-long, narrow peninsula in southwest Turkey separating the Gulf of Gökova to the north from the Gulf of Hisarönü to the south. The peninsula corresponds almost exactly to the administrative district of Datça, part of Muğla Province...
- Gulf of GökovaGulf of GökovaGulf of Gökova or Gulf of Kerme , is a long , narrow gulf of the Aegean Sea between Bodrum Peninsula and Datça Peninsula in south-west Turkey.Administratively, Gulf of Gökova coastline includes portions of the districts of, clockwise, Bodrum, Milas,...
- Foreign purchases of real estate in TurkeyForeign purchases of real estate in TurkeyPurchasing property in Turkey has become more popular with holiday home owners and investors around the globe. Several factors have contributed to the popularity and the trend displayed by foreign purchases and have had important repercussions within Turkey. The issue is especially notable given...
- Blue CruiseBlue CruiseA Blue Cruise, also known as a Blue Voyage , is a term used for recreational voyages along the Turkish Riviera, on Turkey's southwestern coast...
- Marinas in TurkeyMarinas in TurkeyMarinas in Turkey refer to Turkey's ports of call for international and local yachtsmen equipped with modern services routinely expected in recreational boating industry, and they are presently found either in or near Istanbul or İzmir, the two largest port cities of the country, or in or near...
- CariaCariaCaria was a region of western Anatolia extending along the coast from mid-Ionia south to Lycia and east to Phrygia. The Ionian and Dorian Greeks colonized the west of it and joined the Carian population in forming Greek-dominated states there...