We (me and my sister) added Karaburun to this Aegean trip because of the house we found on Airbnb: a spacious stone house on a hill where a very personal touch of the owner was present in the cheerful colors and lovely details. When Ozgur learned about the Karaburun plan he was outraged because it had little to do with his idea of the seaside holiday (beach by day and town by night). Then pretty much everybody to whom we announced our travel route gave us blank looks when hearing about Karaburun.
While researching for the trip I came across a saying about Karaburun that looked even more alarming than the blank looks of the Istanbul acquaintances: “Karaburun, iki bakkal bir furun/ Zeytin ekmek yiye yiye ne ağız kaldı ne burun”. You can translate it as follows: “Karaburun, two grocery shops, one bakery / Eat olives and bread to your heart’s content”. And what we experienced on our first day fitted that description very well.
From the tiny village of Saip on the hill where our house was located we drove into the town. The largest part of the center was occupied by a parking lot and a garage, a small station from where minibuses ferry people to the nearby villages of Balıklova and Mordoğan, but also to Izmir that is an hour or so away. We found that “one” bakery making solid whole-wheat flour bread that, as we discovered, Aegeans often prefer to the snow-white günlük ekmek Istanbullites swear by. The same square housed a supermarket, a famous ice-cream parlor with a most unmotivated red-T-shirted man serving you and a van loaded with freshly caught wild grey millet (kefal) that the fishermen were selling at the most reasonable prices.
We went for a tour of the surrounding lanes. I was on the lookout for the local goat cheese mentioned in the scarce sources on the Karaburun culinary scene. We stopped by a few mom-and-pop shops that sell anything from the chewing gum to the washing detergent and found nothing. Nor did we find more common cheese varieties for breakfast. Overall, the offering was not great, and the prices were often Istanbul-like. Eventually, we came across a shop of a local female cooperative that carried the said goat cheese (Greek kopanisti), essentially a cottage cheese that is knead in a clay pot every day for 2-3 weeks. I tasted it and could barely hold my disappointment: it tasted just like the Trabzon tulum I buy from a vendor at the Sapanca Friday market and cost exactly 5 times more. I politely thanked for the sample, we procured some essentials and retired back to our village to enjoy the light dinner of fruits followed by tea (never mind the Russians).
I was not completely discouraged because we had a local contact. When my mother-in-law heard we were going to Karaburun she told about her dear friend Candan Abla from Izmir who had a summer house in Karaburun. “You will remember the house”, she told Özgür referring to the fact that they vacationed there when he was 5 year old. We found the house and were cordially received and treated to a most elaborated tea table and many insights into the local life.
Candan Abla confirmed my frustrations about the lack of goods and said that they bring some provision from Izmir. “And still’, she noted. “There has been a big improvement over the past decades”. She said that when Ozgur was here with his mom there was just one tiny mom-and-pop shop in Karaburun. She remembered how on that visit Özgür’s mom went to forage in the nearby fields to be able to make a meal. Candan Abla laughed about the episode and said that it would probably be impossible to lure her friend to visit again because of the old memories. There were two tips that Candan Abla gave us though: the Wednesday market and breakfast at Saip Kır Kahvesi, a lovely place only 5-minute walk away from the house we rented.
If you ask me what’s the single most important thing about traveling in Turkey you will tell you: find out the market day of the place you are visiting, and you’ll have more insights into the local life (and food) than you could have hoped for. Even the smallest towns like Karaburun have the nearby farmers and wholesalers come to sell their goods once a week. And even a small market can be rewarding to see.
The villagers’ stalls with more eclectic offering and smaller quantities were the most curious part of the Karaburun market. Many sold peksimet (stone-oven baked whole-wheat rusks), hurma olives (furma, as one of the ladies explained to me; local variety of slightly oblong meaty olives), karabaş flower (lavender variety), dry wild thyme abundant in the nearby hills and even capers (kapari) pickled with tiny hot peppers. The rest of the seasonal bounty included small roundish acur (a type of muskmelon), honey-like local sultania grapes, long cow pea pods (borülce), plump globe eggplants, pomegranates and figs. We also procured some of the best Aegean cheeses on this trip from a vendor generous with the samples (“Near the gözleme stall, it’s always crowded”, mentioned Candan Abla before). We stocked up for many home-cooked meals to come.
The breakfast at Saip Kır Kahvesi was saved for the last morning. Kır Kahvesi is a small house slash a kitchen slash a shop slash a storage with a shady garden overlooking Karaburun and the Aegean Sea. The view from the cafe explains why anybody would give Karaburun (Black Nose) its name: a tiny narrow rocky peninsular does indeed look black.
Saip Kır Kahvesi is your tea garden with shady trees, wooden tables covered with the colorful checked cotton clothes and the mandatory cats leisurely hunting down the flies. The flies and wasps were many indeed, and the first thing that Nihal Hanım, the owner of the place, brought to our table was the incense stuck into a pot of dry sage and ground coffee. The jams arrived, and no single wasp did.
Our breakfast plates were the greenest I have ever seen. Mandatory local olives and cheeses, piece of the whole-wheat börek with herbs, and the greens piled up over the Aegean take on the Mediterranean çökelek salatası where çökelek was replaced with lor and red pepper flakes imparted a substantial kick. Aegeans are renown for foraging and cooking all sorts of wild greens found in the gardens, fields, hills and sea. The Turkish joke points to the great foraging enthusiasm of the Aegean folks: “Hey, brother: one Aegean and four cows have invaded your garden”. “What? Forget the cows, get that Aegean out!” Özgür told Candan Abla laughingly the night before, “If Olga had not married me she would have found a guy from Izmir: she loves all the greens”.
September is not particularly the greens season, but then we experienced another side of the local foraging tradition and converting locally grown fruits, vegetables, berries and flowers in the jams. “Could you, please, tell us more about the jams?” I asked Nihal Hanım once she was done with serving our breakfast. She smiled because the jams are her signature (“Don’t leave without trying her olive jam”, advised Candan Abla). Nihal Hanım started listing: bergamot, dried peach, hyacinth (sümbül), monk pepper (hayit, particularly good for young women Nihal Hanim winked at me and my sister) and narcissus (nargiz). “I forage for all the wild berries and flowers I use for my jams myself”, Nihal Hanım proudly announced.
After a serious breakfast we asked for Turkish coffee that arrived in the company of shot glasses filled with colorful liquids. “Liquor at this hour? Well, we had a precedent“, I thought to myself. “Tamarind, basil, rose..”, explained Nihal Hanım watching out bewilderment probably common for the first-time visitors trying to put their heads around transforming those ingredients into the colorful liquids. Suddenly, the purpose of a huge jar of water and basil left on the sun at the entrance to the garden became clear to me: this is sherbet with fruits, flowers and herbs soaked in water with a bit of sugar and left to ferment for a few days on the sun until the flavor deepens. I left Karaburun content: we marketed, cooked and ate like the locals. What more to want from a seaside holiday?
