I have no reservation correspondence in my archive for Hans and Kristina Becker. What remains is a family photograph I took at Mimas Garden and a two-page entry they wrote in our guestbook on 21 July 2002.
In the photograph, the mother, father and their three children are standing together beside our house. After so many years, I do not remember how they reached Karaburun, how they found us, or how their reservation was made. Rather than trying to fill in that missing part of the story, I prefer to stay with what they themselves left behind in writing.
From their guestbook entry, I understand that they spent more than two weeks in Turkey. Mimas Garden was the first place they stayed during that journey.
They wrote that, as this was their first time in Turkey, they did not know what to expect. They soon became overwhelmed by the kindness of our family and of the Turkish people they met.
The fact that they chose to emphasize this is important to me. In the early years of Mimas Garden, our guests’ impressions of Karaburun and their feelings about the people they met here were often inseparable.
Among the things that impressed them most were the quiet and beauty of the surroundings. They also wrote about their cleanliness.
Reading those lines today brings back the Karaburun of 2002: quieter, less built up, and a place where contact with nature came much more easily. The hillside behind the family in the photograph also records the Karaburun of those years.
The quiet, beauty and cleanliness they described were not simply comments about the house where they stayed. They were impressions of the environment in which they had lived for a few days.
They also gave a special place in their note to the Aegean Sea, writing that they loved the clean blue-green waters of the Aegean.
As I reread the old Mimas Garden guestbooks, I notice how often the sea appears in the memories of people who came from different countries. Some remembered its colour, some the quiet coves, and others the fishing boats.
For the Becker family, what remained in their memory was the cleanliness of the Aegean and its shades of blue and green.
At the end of the guestbook entry, the members of the family signed their names separately. In the photograph, too, we see the mother, father and three children together.
What makes this photograph valuable to me today is precisely that it does not show a special event. It is simply a family standing beside the house on an ordinary summer day at Mimas Garden, with the Karaburun hills behind them and the garden at their side.
In those years I did not take such photographs thinking that one day they would become part of an archive. I took them so that a small memory of our guests would remain. As the years passed, the value of these seemingly ordinary photographs changed.
At the end of their two-page note, they wrote that they would take home very fond memories of Turkey. They also hoped that one day they would return and that we would be able to meet again.
I do not remember today whether that return ever happened, and I have no document in my archive recording a later visit.
But the few lines they wrote on 21 July 2002 are enough to tell us how they felt at the time: a journey that began with the uncertainty of a first visit to Turkey, followed by the kindness of the people they met, the quiet of Karaburun, the beauty of the surroundings and the blue-green waters of the Aegean.
There is no email in Hans and Kristina Becker’s story, no reservation form, and no correspondence from before their arrival in my archive.
There is only one photograph and two handwritten pages.
But sometimes that is enough to bring a story back.
The photograph shows a family of five at Mimas Garden in the summer of 2002. The guestbook completes what the photograph cannot tell us: their first days in Turkey, the uncertainty at the beginning, the warmth they later felt, and what remained in their memories of Karaburun.
Twenty-four years later, what remains is the image of a few days spent in Karaburun and the fond memories of Turkey that they said they would take home with them.
Perhaps this is also part of the value of the Mimas Garden Guest Archive: we do not have every document for every story. But sometimes the few traces that remain are enough to make an encounter from many years ago visible again.