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Tuesday, 16 October 2007

A Dönüm Will Do – Part 1

By Pat Temiz who writes a community information website, Fethiye Times, for ex-pats living in southwest Turkey.

Our search for a place to live in Turkey was conducted through a single sentence delivered in English or Turkish as the occasion warranted:

“We want a piece of land, about a dönüm will do, with a good water supply and some sort of dwelling.”

The dönüm is the standard Turkish land measure, around one thousand square metres and, having gardened a much larger space than that for some twenty years in England, and now being in our mid-fifties, we were planning ahead for old age.

The water supply was necessary for the garden, no thoughts of a swimming pool at this stage, and the existing dwelling was to ease the planning process and satisfy my belief that some sort of house would mean mains water and electricity were already on site in the event we got the dwelling, but not the utilities.

It was Easter 2003 and we were in Turkey to locate an agent who could find our dream plot. This was no sudden decision to relocate as I had first lived in Turkey from 1969 to 1973, spoke fluent, vernacular Turkish, had had a Turkish husband, and our only daughter had dual nationality which meant we could buy in a village in her name at a “Turkish price”.

At that time foreigners could only buy land and property within towns and cities with everywhere else being reserved for Turkish nationals. Buying as British nationals, we’d be stuck with land within a municipal area which definitely did not fit the dream, or a ready-made “villa” which we didn’t want and couldn’t afford.

My companion, Christopher, had visited Turkey several times and we both dreamed of creating an Islamic garden teeming with fruit, flowers, scent and colour with the sound of running water as a backdrop to our twilight years. In England we’d lived in a farmhouse almost a mile along a dirt track with few neighbours for many years and hoped to find ourselves in a similar situation in Turkey.

In October 2002, we had managed a week’s visit to southwest Turkey to find out if we could buy in my daughter’s name using power of attorney; to get an idea of prices; and to decide exactly where we wanted to start our search.

We had spent two weeks in Fethiye in 2001, when Chris learned to dive so we started from there and travelled east along the coast by bus to Kalkan, which was teeming with British-run estate agents offering properties built on the hills surrounding the picturesque old village – with the development already ruining what had been a beautiful Turkish village nestled in a tiny bay, with steep cobbled streets rising from the shore through layers of old, stone houses.

Most were whitewashed with splashes of pinkish-purple bougainvillea pouring out over courtyard walls. The hills were rocky and water seemed to be a problem. A day trip from there to Kaş was no better but that evening, after a delicious dinner in a Kalkan restaurant, we revisited a jewellery shop run by a brother and sister from Istanbul, and when I gave them my set speech, he offered to sell us an old house in a valley in the hills behind Kalkan for £12,000 – and that was the first price, which in Turkey is accepted as a mere starting point for negotiation.

Suddenly we realised we could afford to realise our dream and the next day we caught the first bus back to Fethiye. We would look for somewhere in a village near there as Fethiye and its environs are well supplied with water from a combination of rivers, springs and snow melt from the western Taurus mountains, and only an hour’s journey from the nearest airport.

The whole area is green and lush, in stark contrast to other coastal areas of Aegean and Mediterranean Turkey where water can be hard to find, especially in the hottest summer months.

The tourist trade was also lagging behind in Fethiye. Unlike Bodrum and Marmaris to the west and Antalya and Alanya to the east, Fethiye is a working Turkish town where tourism is by no means the only way to make a living; fruit and vegetable growing are high profile which boded well for our garden dream.

I worked in education so our next opportunity to visit Turkey was Easter 2003 – there were no cheap flights at Christmas. This visit was simply to locate an agent and, two weeks before we flew out my daughter, Leyla, came home from university in Leeds to meet an old friend from her one year at university in Scotland who was now on work experience in Liverpool, a mere 20 miles from our home.

The friend, Nicola, arrived and I sent her upstairs to Leyla. Ten minutes later Nicola reappeared in the kitchen and said, “Leyla tells me you’re going to Fethiye to find an estate agent.”

“Yes,” I replied. “The tickets are booked, we fly out in two weeks”.

“Well my Uncle Ronnie is an agent in Fethiye, he’s married to a Turkish architect, shall we phone him?”

Shall we indeed. We phoned and I promised to phone again when we were actually in Fethiye.

We were to be there for ten days and on three of them, Ronnie took us out and about looking at properties. He seemed to be obsessed with “sea views” to the point where, when visiting a small stone cottage quite high up a mountain, he dragged me up a rock outcrop at the back of the building from where a small sliver of sea could be seen in the distance.

“We don’t care about sea views,” I told him.

“Adds to the value, all the Brits want sea views,” was his reply.

I wanted to say we weren’t “all the Brits,” but bit my tongue as he at least did seem to understand what we were looking for and was confident he could find it.

We went out one day with the local representative of a nationwide Turkish estate agency who showed us two properties: one high on a mountain (with wonderful sea views) but built on rock, and the other at the back of a large petrol station on the main road from the airport. Both sites had huge three-storey houses on them and not much land.

Despite my trotting out my set speech on what we wanted at regular intervals, he clearly wasn’t grasping our ideas. After we’d seen the second one he took us home to meet his wife, drink tea and talk about his previous career as a champion wrestler.

At the end of ten days, we returned to England leaving Ronnie to find somewhere before we next came out in July. We had opened a Turkish bank account during our stay, which seemed to give us a presence in the country. Our budget for the initial purchase was £20,000.

To be continued tomorrow…

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