In the early years of Mimas Garden, we usually communicated directly with our guests. An email arriving through the internet, sometimes a fax, then flight times, meeting at the airport and the journey to Karaburun… Most of the old documents in this archive belong to those years.
Later, we rented our apartments on a long-term basis for a period. By the time we returned to short holiday rentals, the world had changed. The internet had become an ordinary part of daily life and new accommodation platforms had appeared. In 2015, one of our first guests to reach us through Airbnb was Danijela and her family from Belgrade.
Danijela and Đorđe came to Karaburun with their twin daughters, Saša and Dunja.
The note Danijela wrote in our guestbook in July 2015 is especially interesting because it tells how they found us.
It did not begin with a search for a holiday home. Danijela was searching the internet for a recipe for tahini rolls when she came across the blog of a Russian woman living in Turkey. The blog mentioned Karaburun. Curious, she began researching Karaburun, and eventually their path led to Mimas Garden.
Danijela summed it up beautifully in the guestbook: “From tahini rolls to your beautiful home — Internet is really marvelous.”
Reading that sentence today inevitably takes me back to the early years of Mimas Garden. In 1998, some of our guests had found us through an internet that was only beginning to enter everyday life. Seventeen years had passed. The internet had changed enormously, yet it was still bringing together people who had never known one another before.
Danijela and her family came to Karaburun in their own car. On their first visit they arrived quite late at night and could not find Mimas Garden. They phoned us, so we went out, found them and brought them to the house.
Looking back, I realize that not everything had changed between the old period and the new one. The reservation had now been made through Airbnb, but going out at night to find guests who had lost their way in Karaburun was not so different from meeting earlier guests at the airport.
The internet and reservation systems had changed; the relationship with our guests had not.
For Danijela and Đorđe’s twin daughters, Saša and Dunja, Karaburun became a place of discovery. Their mother wrote that the girls loved everything here, but most of all they loved the cats, which they chased all over Karaburun.
One family photograph captures those days especially well. They are coming out of the sea after a day we spent together at the beach, carrying and wearing their swimming toys, armbands and inflatable rings. Saša and Dunja are still small children. Rather than a posed family portrait, the photograph feels like a moment taken directly from an ordinary summer day.
Turkey was not a new country for Danijela and her family. They wrote that they had travelled to Turkey many times, yet were always surprised by its beauty and by the beauty and goodness of its people.
Thanking us for their days at Mimas Garden, they wrote especially about our hospitality and generosity, and about how we made them feel as if they were in their own home.
Reading that sentence today also brings back the small events of the years that followed. Because the family returned again and again, our relationship gradually became more than that of hosts and guests. Sometimes one of the children became ill and we took them to the hospital. We went to the beach together, and over several summers we watched Saša and Dunja grow.
The closeness that began on their first night, when we went out to find them after they had lost their way, continued through their later visits.
Danijela continued her note with the words: “I hope we will see you again next year, and the next…”
It did not remain merely a warm farewell. Danijela, Đorđe, Saša and Dunja returned in the following years, and then returned again. We came to remember them not as guests from a single summer, but as a family we met again over the years. In this way, we also witnessed several summers of Saša and Dunja’s childhood.
They have not come to Karaburun for some time now, but we are still in touch with Danijela and her family.
Over the years Saša and Dunja have grown up. The two little girls in the photograph, coming out of the sea with their swimming toys, are no longer children. It is only natural that as they grew, their interests and travel preferences may have changed. Perhaps they now want to see other places, other countries and other shores. Family holidays change as children grow.
For that reason, I do not see their absence in recent years as the end of the story. Karaburun was part of several summers of their childhood, and for us they became part of a particular period in the life of Mimas Garden. The connection has not disappeared. We are still in touch.
Danijela and her family have another special place in this archive. In the earlier years of Mimas Garden, guests found us through our own website and wrote by email or fax. We discussed reservation details directly, learned their flight times and sometimes met them at the airport. A few handwritten pages in the guestbook then became the personal record left behind from those days.
By 2015 another period had begun. Airbnb, followed by Booking.com, became new meeting points between us and our guests. The way reservations were made, the way people communicated and the whole world of holiday rentals had changed. Mimas Garden became part of that change.
That is why it feels meaningful to me to end this selection of twelve guest stories with Danijela and her family.
At the beginning of this archive were people who, in 1998, found a small holiday home in Karaburun through the internet. At that time, even receiving an email from another country that brought strangers together still felt new and surprising.
At the other end is a Serbian family who, in 2015, discovered Karaburun while searching online for a tahini-roll recipe and then reached us through Airbnb.
Between them lie seventeen years, hundreds of guests and many memories. The forms of communication changed. Faxes disappeared and reservation platforms replaced much of the direct email correspondence. Children grew up. Some people we never saw again; others returned for years.
Danijela’s sentence in the guestbook provides an unexpectedly fitting ending to this final story: “I hope we will see you again next year, and the next…”
And they did return.
Today, Mimas Garden continues in the era of Airbnb and Booking.com. New guests arrive and new stories are lived. But the old photographs, emails, faxes and handwritten notes gathered on these pages belong to another period.
It feels right to complete this small guest archive, which began in 1998, with Danijela, Đorđe, Saša and Dunja, a family who returned for years. Because although the way people travel and book accommodation has changed, one thing has remained the same: the bond formed with some guests does not end when the holiday does.