| About Owlsland | Prices & Booking | Site Map |
| The village month by month archive |
Summer is in full swing now, with temperatures on the coast hitting an astounding fifty degrees (yes, really!) this year. Bezirgan, being 725 metres above sea level, is cooler, which is of course why local people leave the coast for the mountains in summer!
|
Fegmi Dede is probably the oldest inhabitant of Bezirgan. He has a shop which sells everything imaginable, with an inventory to rival Tesco's. Where else could you buy an umbrella, an oil lamp, cloth and salt, all under one roof, and have it delivered? |
| The door to Fegmi Dede's shop - which we reckon rivals any of the art which wins Turner Prizes and the like! |  |
 |
The barley and the wheat harvest is in now, leaving fields of stubble. Everything is bone dry, because we haven't had a single drop of rain since mid-March. |
| Sheep graze in the stubble fields, tended by their shepherds. |  |
 |
Tiny fruits are starting to form on the pomegranate trees as the flowers fade. Most villagers have a couple of these trees in the garden. |
| Not often grown here except as a companion plant alongside sesame, this year one farmer decided to try a whole field of sunflowers - very successfully, as you see. |  |
 |
With its face turned up to the sun, a sunflower in bloom is a truly spectacular flower. |
| The seeds form individually in the flower heads, which will be collected and dried around the end of August. | 
|
 |
Some jobs need done regardless of the season. One of these is making the bread - a group of neighbours will work together to make the task easier, making enough to last their families for a week or so. Here, the dough is being rolled out. |
| Then, the rolled-out dough is cooked on a metal plate over a wood fire. It needs to be turned and kept from sticking and burning. | 
|
 |
When they're making bread, people usually take the chance to make "katmer" using the same dough, but filled with cheese, green onions & spinach. |
High summer, everything's bone dry, and the young birds are fledged and learning to fly.
Email
© copyright Owlsland
The Mountains in Summer - Birds and Wildlife and Wildflowers
Colourful purple thistles line the roads - whilst most other plants have now run to seed in these dry conditions, they are amongst the few still flowering.
The Romans occupied the cities of the Lycian federation around two thousand years ago, and part of their legacy is some amazing works of engineering. Whilst these ought to be cherished and conserved, as often as not they aren't even recognized. An example is this astonishing aquaduct, which must have carried water into the ancient city of Pirha. All the more amazing when you consider that Bezirgan has no town water today!
The one bird which is a bit of a pest is the jay - because, like others of the crow family, he'll rob the nests of other birds, stealing both eggs and chicks. Even saying that, they are beautiful birds nonethless. This is a young bird.
The Garden in Summer - Herbs & Flowers & Wildlife
Another favourite for the jays to steal is fruit - the crop of sour cherries (which make great jam) looks good this year, but if you don't pick the fruit as soon as it ripens, the jays won't leave a single cherry on the tree!
This is the first year we've had spectacled warblers in the garden. A pair nested and raised a brood in one of the conifers right beside the back terrace, You could watch the parent birds fly in and out with insects for their young as you sat at the breakfast table!
The cats don't believe in overworking in the heat - Jesse James takes a nap.
Geraniums just love these dry conditions - they flower and flower when everything else is wilting. Here, they're with valerian, another plant which is happy even in drought.
More geraniums - this is an ivy-leaved variety, which produces dozens of these showy blooms for several months of the summer.
Filling the terraces with tubs and planters is about the only way we can have flowers in high summer - we can manage to water containers when we can't spare the water to irrigate the garden. This selection includes dianthus, sage, scented geraniums and antirrhinums.
And that's a taste of summer in the Turkish mountains -
Come and visit, see it for yourself!
About Owlsland
Prices & Booking
Site Map
The village month by month archive