Aged seven or eight, planting onions on his father’s land above Kabak Bay, Fatih Canözü saw his first foreigner. Before the road came in 1980, his village on the jagged coast of south-west Turkey’s Lycia region was extremely remote, isolated by steep valleys and mountains plunging into the sea. It took his family two days to get to the city of Fethiye on winding donkey tracks, to sell their apricots, vegetables and honey at the market. Despite his shock at seeing the outside world intrude for the first time, Canözü remembers thinking even then that tourism was the future.
Four decades on and having trained as a chef, Canözü has not only built a restaurant and 14 tourist cabins in Kabak, he has married a foreigner too: a former Middle East correspondent from England, who came here to research a novel and ended up falling in love. Now they are raising their family on this wild fringe of Anatolia’s Turquoise Coast, a region that Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founding father of the Republic of Turkey, is said to have called the most beautiful in the country.
