GO COOK:WE SIT around the big kitchen table, knives at the ready. Floor-to-ceiling windows all around us are open to the balmy sea air. "OK – who'd like to chop these?" Semra asks. There are always takers for the tomatoes – very big, very red and very, very sweet. Garlic is easy. So is cucumber.
Onions are another matter. There’s something about Turkish onions which makes the eyes stream and the nose drip. Not a good holiday look. But then, not many holidays are based around chopping onions. “Go on, then,” I say, and hold out my hand for the aromatic allium.
A week on Turkey’s Lycian Coast, learning how to cook with locally sourced organic ingredients, would be a pretty yummy proposition at the best of times; a week at Yediburunlar Lighthouse, however, is a feast for the eyes and ears as well as the digestive system.
We knew we were arriving somewhere special when the road ran out. A right turn off the main road from Dalaman airport had us clambering into the Taurus Mountains: another right turn and we were slithering cautiously along an unpaved stony track. It was hard, quite honestly, to imagine what might lie at the end of it. And then, suddenly, we were there.
The lodge-style property is perched on a cliff overlooking one of the most unspoiled stretches of coastline I’ve ever seen anywhere. To the south and east, mountains unfurl into the sea. To the north and west, drystone walls tame the hillsides into a series of terraces which support wheatfields, olive groves and herds of sheep and goats.
The young married couple who own and run it, Leon and Semra, travelled up and down this coast for a long time until they found exactly the right location. It was, basically, the edge of a mountain farm, too steep to be any use as agricultural land. They persuaded the farmer to sell, and built their dream from scratch.
“It wasn’t easy,” Leon – who’s from South Africa – admits over dinner on the first evening. He tells a tale of broken promises and missing builders which makes Yedi look more impressive than ever. There are four rooms in the main house, with four self-contained lodges dotted around the garden below.
My lodge is the newest. It’s called Kardelen, which means “eagles”. Designed by Leon, it’s a five-star eyrie, suspended over a world of mountains, sky and sea. “We began with the idea of the bed and the window,” he explains. “And the two olive trees.”
The trees lean over the patio in such a way that if it wasn’t for the brand-new Jacuzzi – and the hammock, slung between the trees with a view right out over the clifftop – you’d think it had all been there for years.
Meanwhile, the view from the bed is such that I fear I won’t be able to get out of it for the entire week. But the cookery classes are calling, so I grab my notebook and head up through the garden to the main house. We are eight in the class: one married couple, the rest singles.
We’re going to begin, Semra tells us, by making hummous – a Turkish staple, and quick and easy to boot. She sets us to peeling the cooked chickpeas as Leon provides fresh fruit and tea all round.
Sage tea will turn out to be our preferred tipple, made with freshly picked bunches from the garden – until it’s time to open the first bottle of wine. We’ve decided to drink the latter with impunity, and share the bar bill out equally at the end: a sure sign of group bonding, and a highly civilised way to proceed.
Semra is an expert cook and a keen vegetarian. We’ll go home with a generous number of recipes and plenty of insider advice. Don’t chop onions in the food processor – it makes them bitter. When frying mushrooms use a wide, shallow pan. And don’t add salt – it’ll make them runny.
When buying chilli paste, go for a flaky texture not a powdery one. Semra, needless to say, dries her own chillis while in season and uses the flakes all year round. Turkish cooking, in fact, is often based around seasonal produce – which is perhaps the most important lesson of all. When someone asks if the ground coriander in one recipe could be replaced by fresh, Semra smiles and shakes her head. “Now is not the season for fresh coriander,” she says.
The days pass quickly: too quickly. When I arrive, I wonder whether it might not be somewhat tedious to spend an entire week learning to cook. But Leon and Semra have organised the days so cleverly that tedium just isn’t an issue. Breakfast is at 8.30 each morning; then we’re free to lounge on hammocks in the sun, or swim, until the first cookery session of the day at 11am.
This lasts until lunch, which consists of the dishes we’ve prepared, and takes place on the terrace gazing out at That View. After lunch there’s more swimming/ tanning/ dozing until 5pm, when the second cookery lesson takes us through to dinnertime.
We relax around the big communal table and finish up the bottles of wine – the number of bottles, I notice, increases as the week goes on – until 10pm or so, when we adjourn to bed.
It sounds almost monastic and, in a way, it is. Yediburunlar isn’t the place to come if you’re looking for wild nightlife. But if you’re into wildlife and night skies, you’ll think you’ve died and gone to heaven. You’ll get up close and personal with butterflies, dragonflies, crickets and some startlingly beautiful beetles.
I had to operate a daily rescue service for critters stranded inside my eyrie – my fault entirely, since I ignored the air conditioning and went for wide-open windows and patio doors instead.
It was three nights before I could bring myself to close the curtains on the starscape outside and actually go to sleep like a normal person. I’ve spent years trying to figure out where to go to see a sky properly crammed with stars – Morocco? The UAE? Central Australia? It was here, a short flight away, all the time.
It’s worth getting up early at Yedi, though, because Semra offers optional pre-breakfast yoga sessions at the poolside from which her students invariably emerge calm, stretched and refreshed.
With temperatures soaring into the high 30s and beyond it’s not really the season for trekking, but Yedi is situated on one of the most scenic stretches of the Lycian Way, a 500km marked trail which snakes around the Tekke Peninsula from Fethiye to Antalya. Some of us are longing to give it a go – even when Leon warns us that it will mean a 6.30am start.
We do a couple of brief walks, sheep and goats calling out at our approach, crickets humming up a storm in the olive groves, the dawn light bathing the countryside in burnished bronze. By 8.30 we’re sweaty and manky beyond belief. But it’s enough to make several of us determined to return in April, when the fields are full of wild orchids, the temperatures more suitable for day-long hikes.
Towards the end of the week we walk up the hill for a demonstration of bread-making by the women of a local family. Yediburunlar village is home to 200 souls, and it is the kind of truly rural Turkey to which tourists rarely have access. The making of gözleme, wafer-thin bread which is stuffed with a spinach and ricotta mixture, is a tricky business, as we discover when we are invited to have a go at rolling it out. You start with a piece of dough about three inches in diameter. The aim is to get it almost as big as the table you're working on – which is about 18in. You're kneeling on a plastic sheet and there's an open fire immediately to your left.
It’s a hoot: I’m just glad it’s not my day job. After much merriment and chatter in at least two languages we repair upstairs for a delicious lunch, prepared and served by Ayse and her graceful daughters. The food is so good that despite our best intentions we eat too much. Again. It’s that kind of week.
- Arminta Wallace travelled as a guest of Exclusive Escapes
Go there
For all its splendid isolation it’s 90 minutes from Fethiye and 60 minutes from Kalkan. Yediburunlar Lighthouse is highly accessible through the specialist Turkish, UK-based tour operator Exclusive Escapes (exclusiveescapes.co.uk, tel: 0044-208-6053500). The cookery course takes place once a year. In 2012 it begins on June 30th, and at the time of writing there are 10 out of 12 places available. It costs £1,200 (€1,360), which includes flights (from Heathrow, Gatwick or Manchester), 90 minute transfers to and from Dalaman airport, all meals and two free day trips (see panel below).
A week at Yedi’s Kardelen suite at the end of April 2012 costs £800 (€906) per person. There’s a £550 (€624) supplement for single occupancy. Transfers, meals and day trips are included. Your only expenditure, really, is your daily wine ration – unless you want to spoil yourself with a massage and/or reflexology treatment.
I joined the tour at Heathrow, having flown there with Aer Lingus from Dublin. The flight leaves from Terminal One, inches from where you step off the Dublin flight. There are two Exclusive Escapes check-ins and a special entrance to security. I ended up getting through it all in less than 15 minutes.
What to do in the area
You shouldn't really come to Yediburunlar to do anything except bethere (There are lots of bookshelves with reading material to cater for all tastes, by the way). However, your week's package includes two complimentary day trips. One cruising around the azure waters of Fethiye Bay on your own wooden boat, or gulet, complete with champagne, sunbeds and a yummy meal. Afterwards you visit the fruit and vegetable market at Fethiye (pictured), where the colours and smells are an absolute delight. Make sure you call in at Sister's Place to stock up on saffron, vanilla pods, an extraordinary selection of dried herbs and local aromatherapy oils.
Also included is an early evening Turkish bath at the Regency Hotel in the bustling resort of Kalkan, which clings to a tiny harbour at the foot of the mountains and is one of the hottest places in Turkey. Good fun, great for the tan, and the place to shop for gifts to take home. If you want to extend your holiday in Turkey you could spend a week on a boat, or in Istanbul, or at one of Exclusive Escapes’s other properties in the region
