There is no email or reservation correspondence in my archive from before Alison and Gordon’s arrival. What remains is a photograph I took of them on the Karaburun coast and the single page they wrote in our guestbook on 10 August 2002.
In the photograph Alison and Gordon stand side by side, with the Karaburun coastline, mountains and the Aegean Sea behind them. Their guestbook entry tells us what came before that photograph and how their first impressions of Karaburun changed within a few days.
When they first arrived in Karaburun, they were a little surprised. They wrote that they felt they were “in the middle of the countryside” and even wondered how they would find their way to the beach.
That first uncertainty did not last long. They soon found their way around and began to know the village. In their own words, it became “this beautiful village.”
Reading these lines today brings back the Karaburun of 2002. The surroundings of Mimas Garden were much more open than they are today, so it was understandable that a first-time visitor might initially feel far from the centre of the settlement.
Alison and Gordon wrote not only about the landscape but also about the people of Karaburun, whom they described as warm and attentive.
They placed the beauty of the landscape, the clear blue sea and the beautiful hearts of the people side by side. To me, this is the part of their note that best conveys what remained with them after their stay.
Karaburun had become more than a beautiful coastal village. It was a place they would remember through both its landscape and its people.
They described their holiday as wonderful and relaxing. Then comes a short sentence that says almost everything:
“We are sad to be leaving today.”
Two people who had arrived wondering how they would even find the beach were, only a few days later, sorry to leave Karaburun. That change of feeling tells much of the story by itself.
At the end of their note are several small details for which they thanked me. They thanked me for my kindness in transporting them between Karaburun and the airport, adding in parentheses that it was such a long way.
Then they listed three more things: the figs, smiles and medicines.
After all these years I no longer remember what the medicines were or why they were needed. The figs, however, were a natural part of everyday life in Karaburun. Their appearance in the guestbook is a reminder that it is often the small encounters, rather than the large events, that remain in memory.
At the bottom of their note Alison and Gordon wrote Brighton, East Sussex — U.K. So today we still know that the other end of this small Karaburun story was on the south coast of England.
I have no document showing how they found Mimas Garden or how their reservation was made. But the single page they left behind is enough to tell us how their days here began and how they ended.
Today, twenty-four years later, I look again at the two records Alison and Gordon left behind.
In one, two people stand hand in hand with the Karaburun sea behind them. In the other, they describe arriving and feeling that they were in the middle of the countryside, then finding their way around this beautiful village and being touched by the landscape, the clear blue sea and the warmth of its people.
And they left a small list of thanks: the airport journeys, figs, smiles and medicines…
This is part of what makes the old Mimas Garden guestbooks so valuable to me today. Years later, the details of larger events may fade. Yet a few words preserved on a page can bring the everyday life of those years back again.
Alison and Gordon’s Karaburun story remains in my archive as a small but beautiful memory of the summer of 2002, beginning with the surprise of their first day and ending with their sadness at leaving.