I received the first email from Jan Holthuis on 7 August 1998. He was writing from Zwolle in the Netherlands. While looking on the internet for hotels in İzmir, he had found our homepage, which he described as “very attractive and informative.”
He was due to visit İzmir on business the following week. This time his wife Tjitske and their eleven-year-old son Hendrik would travel with him. Instead of staying, as he normally did, at a hotel in the city, he thought the Four Seasons Apartments might allow him to combine business with a family holiday. He asked how far Karaburun was from the airport and the city centre, and whether we had accommodation available between 11 and 20 August.
Two days later another message arrived. The weather was evidently exceptionally hot at the time, and Jan approached it with a little humour:
“We made up our mind and decided that we can stand the extra-ordinary hot temperature.”
They had decided to stay with us from 11 to 18 August. He sent the details of their evening flight to İzmir and asked whether I could pick them up at the airport.
Jan’s original idea was simple. His family could enjoy a quiet holiday by the sea in Karaburun while he travelled to İzmir in the morning for business and returned in the afternoon.
It did not work quite as he had expected. The journey between Karaburun and İzmir took longer than he had imagined, and he also had more business appointments than foreseen. Their stay therefore had to end after only a few days.
In the guestbook entry dated 14 August 1998, Jan explained why they had to leave early. Then came a sentence that said much about those few days:
“But we leave with pain in our hearts.”
Although their stay had been short, they wrote that they had enjoyed our hospitality, the apartment, the village, the sea and the weather.
One of my warm memories from those few days concerns the children. So that Hendrik would have someone his own age to spend time with in Karaburun, our younger daughter Yasemin joined them and kept him company.
I still have a photograph from those days. Jan and Tjitske are standing with Hendrik and Yasemin, with the old houses of Karaburun below them and the sea stretching into the distance. For me, the photograph is more than a record of our guests. It is also a small document of two families sharing the same Karaburun experience for a few days.
On the second page of the guestbook entry, our elder daughter Nergis appears in the story as well.
The Holthuis family wrote that they especially wanted to thank the person who had called herself “the most important member of the family.” Then they addressed Nergis directly:
“Nergis, you are the communicator ‘par excellence’.”
Those few words perhaps describe the spirit of our guest relations in those years better than a long explanation could. Our guests were not simply staying in an apartment. For a few days, our family also became part of their experience: one of us met them at the airport, another talked with them, and our children spent time with theirs.
The fact that their guestbook note begins with “Dear Aydin, Zerrin, Nergis and Yasemin” feels, looking back today, like a small but meaningful record of that closeness.
Jan’s purpose in that first email had been quite clear: to combine his work in İzmir with a few days of family holiday. The plan did not work exactly as intended. İzmir was farther away than he had expected, his work was busier than anticipated, and they had to leave Karaburun early.
But twenty-eight years later, when I look at what remains, I can see that the shortness of the stay did not prevent it from leaving a trace.
An email sent on 7 August while searching for a hotel on the internet became, only a few days later, a meeting between two families in Karaburun. Yasemin kept Hendrik company; Nergis became their “communicator par excellence”; and when they left, they wrote that they were leaving “with pain in our hearts.”
Sometimes it is not the length of a stay that is remembered, but the closeness created within those few days. That is what remains for me in the Mimas Garden archive from Jan Holthuis and his family.