Ayvalik

Looking through my photo folders on my computer I found these pictures, taken last year in Turkey. Perhaps because the season in New York is white hot, the sky white, the air white, I want to leave. I am homesick for this place I have visited only twice but where I have felt I belonged. I dream of Istanbul, and of Cape Town, and sometimes they are a hybrid, a place I know only in dreams, peopled by long legged, spotted cats, steep sepia streets and neighbourhoods that exist nowhere else. So to pacify my homesickness and my itchy feet, I've made a little retrospective:

Above is the house Bevan restored and the garden he designed for friends in Ayvelik on the Aegean, where we stayed for a few days. Mulberry, loquat, lemon trees; grapes, and the pervading scent of this jasmine arbour. The white mulberries were swept into heaps every morning by the gardener. We had breakfast under the jasmine in the mornings: rings of bread from the market, Turkish coffee, and fruit.


A window in one of the hot stone alleys behind the house, whose cool garden was the exception in town.


An un-photoshopped sunset from a little restaurant on a lagoon some miles past town. Bevan, his friend Lale and I drank raki and ate from plates piled with little deep-fried rouget. Lale sprayed my legs with mosquito stuff to keep me safe.


Lunch at Lale's. Her tiny kitchen gives mine a run for its money. Under another jasmine bower we ate spring peas with dill, little hot sausages, lettuce salad and drank quantities of white wine and beer. Peaches for dessert. She looks after the local khedis (cats), and looks like a khedi herself - broad, high cheekbones and pale green cat-eyes. This is one of the best lunches I have ever eaten. It typifies what I have found in Turkey, and what Bevan first showed me: an innate grace, sense of perfection and inherent generosity, with an unerring and perhaps unconscious eye for what is Proper.


Postcard boats on water like silk - so clear the green seaweed and fish swimming through it could be seen from our table. I was sitting at the table when I took this. A restaurant on a small island over from Ayvelik, reached by a causeway. Lesbos in the background. More raki, a delicous, fennel-y drink, more fish. Fresh, simple, impeccable fish. Raki is wonderful - it's never given me a hangover. You become very funny drinking it, and feel wonderful.