On 9 April 1998, an e-mail arrived from Gülten in the United States. She thanked us for answering quickly, said her husband was very excited, and explained that after working for eleven months she badly needed a holiday. Her final sentence said it simply: “I want to get away from the crowds.”
Only later, in our guestbook, did I learn what our website had meant to her. The photographs of Karaburun had reminded Gülten of her childhood. She showed the page to her husband Jørgen, a university linguist. They looked through the photographs and information together and decided to visit us.
The guestbook page they left on 10 May 1998 is special to me because the same visit is remembered in two languages. Jørgen wrote in English and thanked us for “all the special things you did for us.” Beneath his note, Gülten wrote in Turkish that our website had reminded her of her childhood, that they would never forget the warmth shown to them, and that she and her husband wished to return to Karaburun again and again.
The guestbook records Tacoma, Washington, U.S.A. The geographical distance still strikes me today. In 1998 the internet had connected two people living in Washington State with our small home in Karaburun. Yet for Gülten it did more than reveal an unfamiliar destination: the images first carried her back to her own past.
The story did not end when they returned home. On 26 June 1998, Gülten wrote again after revisiting our website. She thanked us especially for putting online the photograph taken with the shepherds, calling it a “very precious memory.”
The internet therefore appears at both ends of their story. At first, photographs on our website brought Gülten to Karaburun. Later, after returning to America, she opened the same website and found one of her own Karaburun memories there.
Looking at these documents today, the story almost forms a circle. A few photographs on our website reminded Gülten of her childhood. She showed them to Jørgen, they came to Karaburun, met people, saw local life and made new memories. Then they returned to America.
One day Gülten opened the website again. This time she was not looking at photographs that reminded her of an earlier life, but at a photograph from the days she herself had just lived. Perhaps that is what moves me most about this archive: a photograph can invite someone to a place, and years later it can also take them back there.