In search of somewhere to spread her beach towel, Pat Yale heads west and stumbles on a forgotten slice of Byzantium.

Row upon row of featureless summerhouses with piles of builders’ rubble abandoned in between them. A giant branch of the discount supermarket BIM. Litter gently billowing in the wind. Doesn’t sound too appealing, does it, but this is the seaside resort of Enez on the Gulf of Saros, about as far west in Turkey as you can get without crossing the border into Greece.

 

Cut. Rewind a bit. Because of course if that was all there was to it then Enez couldn’t be the popular summer escape for Turkish families that it quite clearly is. The explanation lies in the never-ending stretch of beach that puts out tentacles in both directions. Forty kilometers of sand, and you can’t say fairer than that, can you?

 

Still, few foreigners are going to be lured away from the bright lights and familiar comforts of the Aegean and Mediterranean without more of a carrot than that. For them the good news is that there are actually two Enezes coexisting side by side like an ill-matched couple whose relationship has gone sour. It’s the other Enez, the quieter Enez that struggles to rustle up a single hotel, which is likely to be of most interest to visitors.

 

For Enez read Ainos

The second Enez (really the first one since the beach resort is less than a decade old) stands on the site of an ancient settlement called Ainos that seems to have been established around 4,000 BC. This was later occupied by Greek colonists, then by the Persians and Romans, but its glory days came under the Byzantines when a massive basilica dedicated to Divine Wisdom (Haghia Sophia) was erected here. Later Enez was seized by the Ottomans whereupon the church became a mosque, with a mihrab slotted into its south aisle and its walls deftly repainted.

 

Ainos’ primary attraction had been its location at the point where the Meriç River emptied into the sea. This made it perfect for traders, including the Genoese who established a colony here, but, as at Ephesus, the harbor gradually silted up, leaving the town stranded some four kilometers inland. The result was inevitable. By the time the Ottomans rode in in 1456 the town had already lost its raison d’être. The resort may be hellishly tacky to look at, but it’s brought renewed life to the area, at least until the summer draws to an end.

 

The sight circuit

The great thing about a visit to Enez is that it’s small and compact, with the things to see handily grouped together. The most inadmissible sight is the medieval castle with the great ruined basilica tucked up inside it. On-going excavations have uncovered extraordinary rock-cut depots beneath the later buildings as well as what must have been a delightful sixth-century chapel with a wonderful marble floor. Surprisingly, given how little comment Enez attracts, most of the castle’s walls are still standing as are a series of peripheral towers, the largest of which once housed the local mint.

 

Also worth a look is a doll’s house of a church, which was converted into a burial place for Has Yunus Bey, the Ottoman commander who captured Ainos, then died shortly afterwards. The church looks as if it’s drifted across the border from Greece, although Ottoman tombs of the beturbanned sort that can be seen along Istanbul’s Divan Yolu are jostling each other for position by the entrance.

 

To tick off Enez’s third main attraction you need to venture into the wasteland of summerhouses, which lies across a small lagoon to the east. There the Sahil Kervansarayı, consisting of long, thin barracks erected in Ottoman times, continued in business right into the First World War. It would be a fine sight were it not surrounded by ugly modern development.

 

Sunflowers with everything

If you’ve ever wondered where all the sunflower seeds that rural Turks like to crunch with their tea come from, then look no further than western Thrace where field after endless field is planted with ayçiçekler (moonflowers). In fact this is a surprisingly bucolic corner of the country, with traffic frequently forced to give way to slow-moving herds of cows, and flocks of sheep and goats. Unlikely as it might seem, this is also a part of the world where the donkey cart still finds favor as a preferred mode of transport with the locals.

 

Hotel desert

The biggest snag with a trip to Enez is that if you don’t own a summerhouse there you’ll be struggling to find somewhere to stay. The Hotel Ege in Enez Mark One features a fine line in mothball-scented bathrooms, while the Golden Beach Hotel in Enez Mark Two asks 100TL for a room overlooking a half-built housing development. That leaves Keşan, an hour’s drive inland, which offers some typical city-center business hotels. But then you could just travel out there for the day and be back in Istanbul in time for tea...

 

The great summer migration

Enez is a prime example of a Turkish phenomenon that will strike some visitors as extremely odd. Every year the schools have barely closed their doors for the three-month vacation before half the country ups sticks and migrates en masse to summer houses (yazlıks) by the sea. It’s a migration with a long history, and one that proved lucrative for the Princes’ Islands even in the 19th century. But once upon a time only the well-heeled could afford to indulge in such journeying. Now the middle classes can also manage second homes by the beach, with the result that whole swathes of coastline have disappeared beneath concrete not to provide hotels for foreign tourists but to provide yazlıks for locals.

 

Maybe it’s something to do with ancestral nomadic lifestyles that supposedly linger in the Turkish soul, a yearning to recreate the old annual movement up to the yaylas (plateaus) in search of better pastures. Who knows. The one thing that’s certain is that a transfer to the yazlık holds out no prospect of a holiday for the women of the household who must continue their round of domestic drudgery, just in a different setting.