Turkey: The Hot New Tourist Draw

Twenty years ago, Bodrum, Turkey, seemed like a town that time had forgotten. “It was a small fishing village,” remembers Atlantic Records Chairman Ahmet Ertegun. “The main activities were fishing and sponge diving, as well as work in agriculture — citrus trees, olive trees.” There were a few foreigners to be found haggling over prices with merchants at the bazaar, and a handful of tourists viewing the city’s ancient ruins.

A visitor returning today would hardly know Bodrum. The town’s 185-slip marina is already too small for the flotilla of yachts anchored there from ports as distant as Oslo and Southampton. On the other side of the harbor, near the 15th century Crusader castle that dominates the town, about 200 gulets — motor-equipped sailboats built by local craftsmen — take tourists out for a week or a month in the unspoiled waters off Turkey’s Aegean and Mediterranean coasts. Halicarnas, an enormous open-air disco, pumps music and shoots lasers until dawn. Ertegun, who was born in Istanbul and came to the U.S. as a boy, now owns a sumptuous villa in Bodrum where he entertains such glitterati as Mick Jagger and Oscar de la Renta.

Bodrum is at the center of a tourism explosion that has taken Turkey by surprise. Over the past several years the country has evolved from a quiet, almost isolated land into one of the hottest tourist spots in Europe. Veteran pleasure seekers from all over the world are targeting the country for its gorgeous azure water, unparalleled archaeology and bargain-basement prices. “It was a white spot on the map,” says Heinrich Aken, a medical researcher from Bonn. “Everyone has already seen Greece, Italy, Spain, Morocco and Algeria. Turkey is the only thing left in the Mediterranean.” Explains a Japanese traveler: “The life-style here is exotic.” Nalbantoglu Gunduz, owner of a successful chartering company in Bodrum, has an uncomplicated view of the Turkish tourism boom. Says Gunduz with a shrug: “C’est la mode.”

Only a few years ago, “no one knew anything about Turkey,” says Gordon Roberts, a Briton who retired from the publishing industry two years ago, and now spends nine months each year sailing off the Turkish coast with his wife. “It used to be an absolute backwater. Midnight Express was the only thing that people knew about the place.” (Turkey does have stringent drug laws, and travelers caught with even one gram of hashish risk a heavy jail term.)

Today’s tourists are discovering a Turkey that transcends popular stereotypes. In Istanbul they jam the Topkapi Palace to gaze at the 400-room harem of the sultanate and to view its incomparable treasury of emeralds, diamonds, gold and ivory. They pack the Blue Mosque and the other masterpieces of Mehmet Aga, Turkey’s great 17th century architect. Bargain hunters fill the cavernous covered bazaar looking for rugs, leather goods and gold. To the south, near Izmir, tour guides jockey for position at the ruins of Ephesus, where the main attraction is the Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. In Cappadocia, the eerie area in Central Anatolia where thousands of monks lived in conical towers of rock during the early Christian period, 22 tourist buses were recently parked together.

In 1987, 2.8 million people visited Turkey, a 20% increase over the previous year. The tourists injected about $1.3 billion into a faltering economy; the annual inflation rate is a devastating 70%. This year the country expects to reap about $2 billion from an anticipated 3 million visitors. These numbers still pale beside the 7 million tourists who flock each year to neighboring Greece, a country that boasts about a fifth of Turkey’s population of 55 million. But, according to a recent report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, tourism in Turkey is growing faster than in any of the two dozen other OECD countries surveyed. The report concludes that earnings from Turkish tourism increased 215% between 1981 and 1986. Japan was a distant second, showing a 95% growth in tourist earnings over the same period.

Partly because of their long-standing prejudices and misconceptions, Americans accounted for only 6% of foreign visitors last year. “We were a bit frightened about Turkey,” says Chuck Pyfer, a physician from Eugene, Ore., who is backpacking through the country with his wife Kathy. “All our friends asked us, ‘Why would you ever want to go there?’ ” After first visiting Greece and one of its islands, Kos, about six miles off the Turkish coast, the Pyfers decided on the spur of the moment to see Bodrum. They loved what they found. “The people are gentle and gracious, and the villages are wonderful,” says Pyfer. “We’ll be back.”

If perfect weather and stunning sights are not enough to explain this popularity, there may be another reason for the tourism explosion. “Let’s not be coy,” says Briton Charles Stanford, who is traveling through the country in a camper with his wife. “The exchange rate has a lot to do with it. Every week we’re here, the lira improves.” Three years ago the Turkish lira was about 600 to the dollar; today it hovers around 1,300. Pamela Douglas, 24, a Los Angeles student, has been sharing rooms at boardinghouses for 2,500 liras a night. At the current exchange rate, that comes out to slightly less than $2. For that price, says Douglas, “I expected lice.” Instead, she has found the rooms modest but clean.

To be sure, this is no land for five-star aficionados. It has virtually no true luxury hotels, and the number of total hotel beds is an absurdly low 120,000. The space situation is so bad that officials in Urgup, the main town of the Cappadocia region, are opening up private homes to tourists to ease the shortage. Telephone service is poor almost everywhere in the country, and road conditions are often atrocious. Even a town as large as Bodrum (pop. 13,500) still has no sewer system. Tourists who choose to travel in the eastern areas are advised to bring their own toilet paper.

There are some who fear that the tourism boom is stripping Turkey of its charm. “The most important thing for us,” says Ertan Cireli, Turkey’s Under Secretary of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, “is not to repeat the errors that other countries have made in the past.” But critics charge that Turkey is already well on its way to becoming an addled Eden. Purists are particularly troubled by the burgeoning development of cheap apartment buildings and hotels along the Aegean coast. Says Stanford of the area: “It’s one bloody construction site.” Some people say that Bodrum’s attractiveness began to decline long ago. Artists and writers who favored the city a decade ago have already moved south to less developed areas. “As a businessman, I’m very happy with Bodrum now,” says Charter Owner Gunduz. “But as a Bodrum citizen, I’m crying.”

But for Ahmet Ertegun and other lovers of the good life, much of Turkey is still the next best thing to paradise. “What has happened to St.-Tropez will not happen to Bodrum for another 20 years,” he predicts. “People are just discovering it. The Mediterranean coast of Turkey is still virgin.”