Kalkan is very popular with Britons

I was looking forward to my first visit to Turkey, although I had hardly heard of Dalaman when I arrived at the airport in July for a flight that left and arrived bang on time which is always a great start to a holiday. The first Turks we saw at the visa desk you simply hand over a £10 note (not Scottish)  were wearing face masks. But this swine-flu precaution was the only time our hosts weren’t keen to talk and entertain us.

From the airport, we had a two-hour transfer to Kalkan, on the beautiful Lycian coast, facing Rhodes across the Aegean. Kalkan, a former fishing village, is very popular with Britons, both holidaymakers and expats. Tins of Nescafe and baked beans are stacked high in the supermarkets – one is called Tesko. The “Brit effect” means there are several websites (try enjoykalkan.com) with lots of information to plan your stay, including a very useful restaurant map.

Houses plunge from the main road, which follows the rocky coast, to the shops and eating places down at the old port. Many of the best hotels above the town have fine sea views – and virtually every restaurant has a roof terrace, enabling you to choose the next evening’s venue as you savour your meal. Kalkan has a small, pebbly beach, but is only a few miles from Patara, whose nine miles of sand and dunes are among Turkey’s finest.

Patara is also a nesting place for the loggerhead turtle, a species 95million years old, and has ruins dating from the time when it was an important port. Shifting sands silted it up and it was abandoned about 800 years ago. You can get there easily and cheaply by the local minibus service. These vehicles, known as a dolmus  Turkish for “full up”  leave when the driver has enough passengers.

Or you can use the excellent taxi service  particularly useful for an uphill trip to the hotel after a good night out. You could happily spend a holiday around the hotel pool or, like some of our fellow guests, visiting picturesque ports along the coast by gulet, a luxurious wooden sailing ship. But it would be a shame to miss the Lycian coast’s many attractions.

Our three excursions took in a Turkish delight factory and a gold and jewellery centre. One highlight was a fascinating hand-woven carpet co-operative, where two fellow guests bought two large carpets for dispatch by ship to England. It was the history that most fascinated us. The area has had a host of invaders and rulers  Greek, Roman, Persian, Byzantine and Ottoman, to name a few. St Paul stopped off there on his missionary journey, and St Nicholas (Father Christmas) was born in Patara.

We visited the ruined hill-top citadel of Tlos, a powerful member of the Lycian League, a democratic federation of cities founded in 186BC. The highlight is the Byzantine fortress, whose walls are made from rocks used by previous conquerors, including Roman columns cut up and placed sideways  a bizarre sight. In the sheer cliffs are Lycian rock tombs resembling tiny Roman temples, and below, baths and a well preserved theatre.

We followed the steep climb with lunch at a restaurant on a trout stream, one of many excellent meze (mixed Turkish starters) and fish meals on our trip. Another trip took us to the resort of Fethiye, a tourist centre with a large marina and a beach nearby at Oludeniz.

The Tuesday market here has everything from axes to saffron. But the highlight is the vegetables: every variety you can think of, and plenty we didn’t know. It makes even the best French markets look ordinary. Dinner that evening was at one of the strangest places I have visited. Kayakoy is a deserted town, abandoned after its Greek residents joined a “population exchange” following the Turkish War of Independence in 1922.

The abandoned buildings were hit by an earthquake in 1957. Some are now being restored, but it will always be a rather spooky spot. The Greek influence goes back a long way in this part of Turkey, and is still noticeable. We went on a 30-minute boat trip from the pretty port of Kas, a base for several diving schools, to an island that the Turks call Meis but the Greeks know as Kastellorizo. We heard of it by chance in a travel article which named the best “secret” Greek islands.

There are trips every weekday, but we went on a Saturday and, as we approached the colourful port, it appeared to be almost as deserted as Kayakoy. The year-round population of this most easterly of all Greek islands is barely 200, but we found plenty of bars and restaurants as lunchtime approached. “Welcome to Europe,” said our jolly host, as he served us squid and salad.

After a week struggling with the Turkish lira exchange rate, it was a shock to find prices in euros  nearly everything is shipped in from Rhodes, or by air in the summer. On the mainland, it was the ancient history that was interesting, but Kastellorizo has a fascinating recent past.

Between the two world wars, it was occupied by the French and Italians. When British commandos landed in 1943, the whole population was evacuated to Palestine to escape German air attacks. Most did not return, but took a British offer to emigrate to Australia. More than half the island’s 2,000 homes were destroyed by a wartime fuel-tank explosion, and the final blow came when a boat returning refugees to the desolate island sank and 33 people drowned. The island was reunited with Greece in 1948.

Now it is a haven of calm compared with busy Turkish ports, and ideal for walking and exploring. We returned to Turkey, picked up passports retained by the port authorities for a visa stamp and headed back to the wonderfully named Hotel Elixir, in Kalkan, for a final, delicious harbour-side fish meal. Try Turkey once and you might well become a regular, like so many of the people we met. pressjournal reported.

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