The St. Tropez of Turkey : It’s easy to fall in love with ancient Bodrum. One traveler tells how he stumbled upon this jewel of the Turkish Riviera and was so dazzled that he stayed.

It was the spring of 1985. After spending autumn and winter in the town of Lindos on the Greek island of Rhodes, I was about to return to the United States. But before doing so, I thought I’d take a closer look at those shadowy lumps across the water to the north and east--Turkey. It ended up being a very close look indeed.

Almost from the moment I stepped off the ferry at the little Turkish port of Marmaris, about a 3 1/2-hour voyage from Rhodes, I found myself shedding preconceptions. For one thing, I had assumed that offshore islands were, topographically, merely condensed examples of the mainland--footnotes in the water. In fact, there could hardly have been a greater contrast between the jagged, rocky landscape I had just left and the forested mountains rising steeply on both sides of the deep fiord leading to the port.

For another thing, like many Westerners, I had grown up with a vague prejudice against the Turks. This is hardly surprising, considering the bad press they have received: The medieval Church, for instance, included “plagues, floods, comets, earthquakes and Turks” in its catalogue of the dire consequences of sin. And in the 16th Century, Martin Luther prayed to be delivered from “the world, the flesh, the Turk and the Devil.” This sort of thing, obviously, leads to an image problem.

I was greatly relieved, then, to find that the image and the reality were not even distantly related--that the Turks, from the moment I met one, were perhaps the friendliest, most hospitable people I had ever encountered.

Indeed, I found my welcome so warm in Marmaris that, instead of returning through Greece as I had planned, I decided to rent a car and drive, at a leisurely pace, to Istanbul, then start home from there. Thus began my accidental adventure--an adventure that has not yet ended.

I started off one morning--after a perfect breakfast of white cheese, black olives, fresh bread, pine honey and Turkish coffee--along a road that was to take me through majestic mountains bearded with pines and cypresses, down along coastal plains sprouting silver birches and olive groves and past a blur of tableaux vivants that introduced me, glimpse by glimpse, to life in Asia Minor.

I saw old women in billowing pantaloons trundling along the roadside, their torsos parallel to the ground, their backs weighted by loads of twigs and branches. I saw caravans of laden camels whose arrogant, bored expressions seemed clearly intended to let passers-by know that they were only in this for the money. I saw flocks of sheep chivied away from the highway by shepherds in sheepskin (!) coats; groups of old men propped against tables in the shade, puffing cigarette smoke at the road, and boys in jackets and ties cascading out of little schoolhouses. I saw occasional huddles of orange-tiled roofs, each with a white minaret needling the air, from which muezzins summoned the faithful.

My first stop was a town called Bodrum (pronounced BOW-drum), the ancient city of Halicarnassus, about 100 miles northwest of Marmaris. Now best-known as a holiday resort, with a forest of yacht masts tilting in the harbor beneath its magnificent Crusader castle, Bodrum was famous 25 centuries ago as the birthplace of Herodotus, the “Father of History”--and again not long afterward as the provincial capital of the Persian satrap Mausolus, whose tomb (the original “mausoleum”) was to become one of the Seven Wonders of the World.

When I say that Bodrum was my first stop, I don’t mean to give the impression that I simply pulled off the road at a convenient exit marked “Bodrum.” No, you have to aim for Bodrum. Whether you are coming from the south, as I was, or the north, you have no choice but to approach the town from the northeast. This means abandoning the northbound highway at Milas or ancient Mylasa, and looping back across an alluvial plain until you reach the northeast corner of the Bodrum Peninsula at Guvercinlik Bay. From there, the road begins to climb along the edge of the bay, escorted by pines up to the mountains that form the vertebrae of the peninsula. The road curves again and again--until you come around one last bend and see first the mighty Castle of St. Peter, and then Bodrum itself stretching out below. The vista defies you to keep your eyes on the road.

As it happened, Bodrum was not only the first stop on my journey, it was also the last. I fell in love with the place. Suddenly, I saw no reason at all to hurry on to Istanbul, or even to return, in the immediate future at least, to America. As with any infatuation, it’s difficult to identify, much less explain, exactly what was so captivating about Bodrum--but I’ll try.

To begin with, there is the physical beauty of the place. Twin bays frame a strip of land on which rises the Castle of St. Peter, one of the most impressive surviving medieval castles. Built by Crusaders in the early 15th Century, it now houses Bodrum’s Museum of Underwater Archeology. Above each bay, white houses spill like sugar cubes down to the water’s edge. And the water! All along this portion of the Turkish coast, the Aegean Sea abandons its blueness and turns emerald green, refracting and liquefying the sunlight into bright, wavy slivers of rainbow that comb the sand beneath the crystal water.

Bodrum has managed to keep its recent expansion relatively seamless, thanks to a strict building code (there are no high-rises) and a lot of whitewash. And the impossibility of widening the little streets that snake away from the waterfront has kept the scale, the coziness of the place intact--and has even produced amusing juxtapositions, since the designer boutiques have had to move into what gaps they can find, like gold fillings in rows of snaggle-teeth.

Even more alluring than Bodrum’s sheer beauty are the people. Long before it became a magnet for the international set, Bodrum was a haven for Turkish writers, artists and sundry other eccentrics. The first close friend I made there, for instance, was Kemal Utku, a brilliant silversmith who studied under former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski at Columbia University and who holds a Ph.D. in political science from New York University.

Through him, I met Ali Guven, a sandal maker so revered by the Beautiful People that the likes of Mick Jagger and Brigitte Bardot come regularly to him to be shod. And through my newly acquired Turkish girlfriend (I did say that these were friendly people), I met the man who was to become my doctor, Sezgin Gokmen--certainly the only physician in this part of Turkey with a Southern drawl and a great jump shot: He was educated at the University of North Carolina. With friends like these for starters, I soon found myself surrounded by dozens of fascinating people--and thus dozens more reasons to stay.

In recent years, Bodrum has become one of the most fashionable resorts on the Mediterranean. As noted, Jagger and Bardot are sometimes seen hereabouts. Ahmet Ertegun, the socially prominent, Turkish-born co-chairman/co-CEO of Atlantic Records, keeps a house here. So does Turgut Ozal, president of Turkey. Henry Kissinger comes to visit his friend Ertegun.

Happily, though, the presence here of such luminaries hasn’t spoiled the town. Unlike other Mediterranean resorts with similar backgrounds--picturesque small port with interesting past; beautiful but somewhat remote location; bohemian population which, by perverse alchemy, turns the place into a fashionable hideaway (St. Tropez comes to mind)--Bodrum has lost none of its personality as it has gained temporary residents. It still looks and feels like a small, ancient town.

It is hardly, however, the only ancient metropolis in the vicinity. As I quickly discovered, there is still more to love about Bodrum: Within striking distance are some of the most important and fascinating cities of antiquity, among them the ruins of Priene and Miletus, two of the 12 Ionian cities; Didymi, seat of an oracle of Apollo; Hierapolis, famous in prehistoric, Christian and Roman times; Aphrodisias, a wealthy Roman and Byzantine center, and, most important of all, Ephesus--the best-preserved of all the great cities of the classical world--which is about a three-hour drive away.

I first visited Ephesus myself in the early spring. I was fortunate because there were no tourists around at the time. I won’t try to describe this marvel of a place in detail. What I will say is that I dare anyone who is not brain-dead to go there, to walk along the colonnaded Arcadian Way where Marc Antony and Cleopatra once rode in procession, to sit in the vast amphitheater where St. Paul preached to the Ephesians, to contemplate the facade of the Library of Celsus or even just to stand among the wildflowers struggling to make their presence felt between the floor stones of ancient temples, and then to go away thinking about the same things he was thinking about when he arrived.

In my case, I must admit, I went away thinking how grateful I was that the statues around me had marble eyes. Otherwise they might have witnessed my tiny crime against history. There, in the sunlit silence of a city 3,000 years old, where the stones resonate with the timeless glories of Greece, Rome and Byzantium, there, feeling hungry, I looked at my watch. I’m still ashamed.

Anyway, with so many reasons for staying in Bodrum, I stayed. I mean really stayed. By a complex and frequently (in retrospect) hilarious series of maneuvers, I bought some land in an olive grove high on a mountainside near the city with a commanding view of the Aegean. Then I got hold of a Turkish builder--I was to get hold of him several times more, mostly around the neck, in the months that followed--and began to build a house, my fantasy house. It took 15 months and almost as many crises to complete, but it was worth it. As a young American visitor exclaimed one day, upon stepping out onto my patio, “My God, I didn’t know they made postcards this big.”

Today, for a complex and frequently (in retrospect) hilarious series of reasons, I no longer own the house. I still return as often as I can to Bodrum, but I do it as a visitor again. Has it lost its magic for me? Hardly. Especially at that time of the evening when the sun dissolves into the sea; when promiscuous eruptions of purple bougainvillea against white walls cease to dazzle the eye as they blur into darkness; when the subtler charms of jasmine and honeysuckle begin to fill the air seductively, then I fall in love with Bodrum all over again.

GUIDEBOOK

In and Around Bodrum

Getting there: Among airlines flying from Los Angeles to Istanbul are Lufthansa (through Frankfurt), KLM (through Amsterdam), British Airways (through London), Swissair (through Zurich), Delta (through Dallas and Frankfurt) and TWA (through John F. Kennedy Airport in New York and Frankfurt). Until the end of March, a midweek fare with 30-day advance purchase comes to about $1,200 round trip; during the April-May shoulder season, about $1,350; June through October, about $1,470.

From Istanbul, Turkish Airlines flies twice daily to Dalaman for $112 one way. In Dalaman, most travelers will rent a car for the hour’s drive to Marmaris, then on to Bodrum--or will take advantage of the country’s generally excellent and inexpensive public bus system.

Where to stay: There are a large number of hotels, inns and B&Bs; in and around Bodrum. Some are open only for the summer season (mid-April until the end of October), others year-round. I would especially recommend the TMT Holiday Village (48400 Akcabuk, Bodrum; from U.S. phones, dial 011-90-6141-1232) and the Hotel Myndos (Eskicesme Mah., Bodrum; 011-90-614-13080). Both are open summers only and offer relative luxury--including swimming pools, tennis courts and assorted bars and restaurants--for relative peanuts, $70-$75 double, about $50 single. The Manastir is a restored monastery open year-round on a hill overlooking the Bay of Bodrum and the castle (011-90-6141-2775). Rates with breakfast are about $45 single, $65 double, view rooms about $10 extra.

Food and drink: My favorite restaurants are the Amphora (Neyzen Tevfik Cad. 164; telephone locally 2368), on the western bay across from the yacht marina, and the Sapa (Kulcuoglu Sok. 6; telephone 2553 or 3507), in a delightful courtyard away from the bustle of the waterfront. Both serve excellent traditional Turkish food. For after-dinner drinks and merrymaking, many locals and visitors alike head for the Hadigayri Bar (Dr. Alim Bey Cad.; 5155) or the famous Halikarnas disco (Cumhuriyet Cad. 128; 1073), with its laser-lighted, open-air dance floor overhanging the water’s edge in the eastern bay. I prefer the Jazz Cafe (Cumhuriyet Cad.; 6341), about 100 yards beyond the Halikarnas, run by two wonderful chaps--Cengiz and Mete.

For more information: For virtually anything else you might want in and around Bodrum--hotel reservations, villa rentals, yacht cruises, archeological tours, day trips, flight or ferry information, legal advice, camel hire, secondhand books--try Uncle Sun Yachting & Travel Agency (Ataturk Cad. 61; 2659 or 5501; fax 2460). The proprietors, Teo Onursan and his wife, Annie, say they have never received a request they couldn’t fulfill.

For general information on travel to Turkey, contact the Turkish Consulate General, 821 United Nations Plaza, New York 10017, (212) 687-2194.