JANUARY 2020
TURKISH OPULENCE by Andrew Harris
A spiky take on what’s hot for 2020
Originally conceived as a beach club, this Bodrum hotel will make you feel a part of the jet-set
Anyone forming their impression of Turkey’s Mediterranean coast solely from the news reports of recent years might end up slightly terrified. But memories can be short. The sea is still a crystal-clear breathtaking blue, and the sun never stopped doing its daily dappled dance all over it. Everything’s quite a bit cheaper too after US sanctions caused the Turkish currency to plunge in value. Suddenly there’s a lot of people going to Turkey.
Not least in the upscale enclave around Bodrum, which looks like it’s determined to have a bit of a moment. In common with other honeypots of holiday high fashion like Bali, Ibiza, or Goa, Bodrum’s credentials were crystallized in a 1970s crucible of counterculture cool.
Not much more than a time-worn, overgrown village, the remnants of the ancient city of Halicarnassus, 50 years ago its slow-paced, off-grid allure attracted the attention of Turkey’s wealthy Bohemian set. Ahmet Ertegun, the Turkish/American boss of Atlantic records, bought a rundown seafront property in Bodrum for $60,000 in the Seventies, his designer interior widow Mica, eventually sold in 2014 for €13 million.
His fellow pioneer was Ayla Emiroglu, an outlier for Istanbul’s arty crowd, who converted a nearby property into a small hotel which she named Macakizi, the Queen of Spades. Bodrum was in with the in-crowd. Mick and Bianca were hanging out on the waterfront where women still washed their goats, and Rudolf Nureyev was dropping by for Sunday lunch, Ayla, nicknamed the Queen of Spades one night by a local Bodrum man became of the shape of her wild hairstyle, drew in Istanbul’s rich and famous and mingled them with the musicians, writers, and artists of the day. Bodrum was on the map, and she was right there with it. The hotel relocated a few times until in 2000, in collaboration with her am Sahir, returned from a 20- year stint successfully operating nightclubs in the United States, Macakizi settled into its present position, 90 minutes north of Bodrum.
Originally conceived as a beach club, the current incarnation of Macakizi, nestled into a picture-perfect cove on the edge of the village of Golturkbuku, its 74 bougainvilleas, and oleander-festooned moms cascading down the hill behind, remains at the epicentre of Bodrum’s ongoing evolution of opulence. Sahir runs the show now; the Queen of Spades has folded her hand in favour of the King of Clubs. On first name terms with A-listers across the globe, he is perhaps even more socially connected than his mother.
Recent years have seen luxury hotel brands slowly slide into Macakizi’s slipstream and onto the surrounding coastline, adding style and substance to the concept of a Turkish Cote d’Azur. No matter how shiny and new, though, the corporate copycats simply can’t dislodge this independent style-setter from a pole position that the queen bee created over forty years ago, and around which, everything has buzzed ever since.
To watch the day unfold at Macakizi, as it steadies itself from the night before and readies itself for the day ahead, is a trip to the theatre. Its beach club origins, where eating and drinking are very much to the fore, are evident from the cleverly conceived contemporary design, descending level by level from the expansive open-air breakfast pavilion to the Instagram-ready restaurant down the bayside sun decks and a seriously stylish, busy waterfront bar.
The rooms aren’t especially glitzy, but somehow with innovative design and colourful landscaping, that doesn’t seem to matter, because somehow it all works. The contemporary cutting edge of regular visitors like Kate Moss and Adam Clayton, sits seamlessly with Eastern Mediterranean glitterati that at times looks like it hasn’t jetted far from the 1960s Jet-set, as it slowly smokes itself into oblivion.
Sahir himself has a cigar permanently glued to his lingers, in an image that should be screaming ‘old fashioned plutocrat’, but doesn’t. On the contrary, this isn’t so much a man whose linger is on the pulse; down this end of the Med, he is the pulse!
Every day, an overpowered powerboat pulls up and disgorges one of Turkey’s wealthiest men for his lunchtime date. An impressively designed board-walk wraps around the waterfront, transforming the sea into a seductive saltwater swimming pool. The Mediterranean’s east-meets-west of beautiful people is laid out three-deep in an oil-slicked siesta of silicon-supported sun worship. The catalogue of contradictions continues when high noon hits high society with the piercing notes of the call to prayer from the village mosque: a wake-up call that’s met with bronzed bikini-clad puffs of nonchalance on cigarettes as thin as pipe cleaners. The Bodrum peninsula along this part of the turquoise coast, where the Aegean nestles up to the Mediterranean can be spectacularly beautiful. Slotting like a jigsaw into Greek islands so close you can almost touch them, their ancient intermingled histories deliver up culture, climate, and cuisine, as enchanting as any other corner of the Med.
Dining out in Turkey can be a revelation. The country that introduced agriculture into Ireland 6,000 years ago (according to 2010 academic findings also claiming the Turkish men who did so, fathered the nation!), can do delicious things with its bountiful produce, and there can be few better locations to savor Turkish cooking than in Macakizi’s restaurant. The executive chef there, Aret Sahakyan, has been in place torn years and is regularly cited as the most accomplished exponent of Turkish gastronomy outside of Istanbul. The Turkish wine industry is also resurgent, with newly established ventures such as nearby Ude Winery producing wines of outstanding quality. After a trip out on Sahir’s yacht to visit Loft, the Macakizi branded development along the coast, which will offer short-term rentals when it opens next year, I Join him in a swim back to shore. It’s the that time I’ve seen him without the cigar, although he could be doing breaststroke with it underwater.
TRAVEL FACTS
GETTING THERE: Ryanair flies Dublin to Bodrum from €50 return, visit ryanair.com
WHERE TO STAY: Macakizi operates April to October, from €475 per night, including a three-course dinner