Bodrum, Türkbükü – The St.-Tropez of Turkey.

As the stars glimmered overheard and illuminated white yachts drifted in the distance, waiters in white shirts bearing the words “Saint-Tropez” threaded among the Philippe Starck chairs and dancing V.I.P.’s, extending cocktails into outstretched arms adorned with designer watches and impeccable tans. Working the other side of the room, a roving photographer popped off a succession of flashbulb bursts as he captured mugging corporate tycoons and fashion models.

“Viewed from the translucent orange stools at the long bar, it seemed as if another classic St.-Tropez session of all-night partying and celebrity glad-handing was kicking off with characteristic zeal and excess. There was just one hitch: the real St.-Tropez was well over 1,000 miles away. This was the tiny Turkish village of Türkbükü on the north side of the Bodrum Peninsula.
For the upper-crust Turkish crowd at the club, Bianca, the difference was merely academic. Sitting inside an on-site jewelry boutique doubling as an office, the club’s owner, Emre Ergani, stroked his handlebar moustache and boldly declared that the Champagne-drenched, celebrity-draped French Riviera hotspot was a kindred spirit of Türkbükü, a fishing town whose traditional draws have included red mullet and sea bream.
“St.-Tropez is a place for people of A-plus quality, and so is Türkbükü,” he said, explaining that the town had lately rocketed from picturesque beachfront backwater to second-home haven and party playground for Turkish celebrities.

As a glass case holding $7,000 Champagne flutes sparkled behind him, he added that international stars were now getting wind of Türkbükü, too. “People I know from St.-Tropez are buying houses here,” Mr. Ergani said.

On the face of it, this seems an outrageous claim for this hamlet hidden on the Aegean, the body of water that Homer called “the wine-dark sea.” Even the most desperate addicts of checkout-aisle literature and live red-carpet reports probably wouldn’t recognize the name, which sounds halfway to Timbuktu and might reasonably conjure images of a Turkish answer to Mötley Crüe.
Unlike the storied Côte d’Azur resort, Türkbükü’s unusual name isn’t a fixture of Page Six and has yet to roll from the tongues of the bikini-clad hosts of “Wild On.” Matisse never painted there, Pink Floyd hasn’t named a song for it, Sean Combs hasn’t rapped about it, and Pamela Anderson and Kid Rock chose the real St.-Tropez for their wedding last month. You won’t find the getaways of Brigitte Bardot or Joan Collins hidden in the olive and lemon groves around the bay’s green-brown hills. There is no Turkbuku brand of tanning lotion or alcoholic drink.

In other words, by many barometers of jet-set status, Türkbükü is still a good distance down the scale from St.-Tropez. But that distance could be closing fast.
Ask Mr. Ergani to enumerate the boldface names that have visited Bianca in recent years and he produces a list that sounds much more redolent of the south of France than the southern Aegean: Ivana Trump. Paris Hilton. Michael Douglas. Prince Charles. The Japanese fashion mogul Kenzo Takada, he will tell you, “practically lives here.”

Nor are these the only luminaries to drop into Türkbükü’s increasingly glittery environs, which nestle a showy spread of music-blasting beach clubs, boutique hotels and moored megayachts. In the never-ending search for new sun-soaked havens beyond the well-trammeled Mediterranean shores, a host of global stars of the boardroom and box office have begun to stake out this nook of the Turkish coast. Some, like the billionaire Jeffrey Steiner, the chief executive of the Fairchild Corporation and a fixture of the St.-Tropez social scene, have bought palatial spreads in the hills. Others, like Tom Hanks, have cruised in during sailing trips.
“It feels like a nightclub on the ocean,” said André Balazs, owner of the Chateau Marmont hotel in Los Angeles and other luxury properties. Mr. Balazs, who is also a longtime regular in St.-Tropez, discovered Turkbuku last summer on vacation with Uma Thurman. He called the town “very popular, very busy, very social.”
In a sense, this attractively rugged region of the Turkish coast — the peninsula is a landscape of hills, mesas, craggy coves and windswept beaches — has been producing or seducing celebrities since antiquity.

“When I first came here, 30 years ago, I had a small Italian car, a Fiat,” said Sinan Ozer, owner of the locally based Aegean Yacht Services. “It was the only car in Bodrum.”
Now, he added: “Everybody wants to come here. It’s like Ibiza, or Antibes in France.”
On a July afternoon along Türkbükü’s buzzing seaside boardwalk, the village’s rustic past and glamorous present rubbed sun-tanned shoulders.

As house and R & B music pulsated from open-air bars, moneyed couples in Chanel double-C sunglasses and young women in gold bikinis poked into swimwear and jewelry boutiques, pausing occasionally to eat boiled mussels from scruffy fellows operating makeshift sidewalk stands. Fishermen hustled through the crowd carrying dripping plastic bags of freshly caught sea bass to restaurants where white-haired men rattled backgammon dice and sipped milky-hued raki, the lightning-strong, anise-flavored national drink.
From a slender mosque minaret — its tip sharpened like an arrow pointing to heaven — the call to prayer resounded through the warm afternoon. But Allah was losing the popularity contest to the sun worshipers trodding onto the long docks that extend like spokes into the bay.

There is no sand on this part of the coast, only these elaborate wood-plank beach clubs. Each is outfitted with ranks of plush white mattresses, fluttering white canopy beds, gauzy Arabesque tents and amply stocked bars. Some tanners arrive on motorboats from ships out in the bay; the more extravagant swoop in on seaplanes, sending up ostentatious splashes.
Like a seaside sorority row, each club draws its own distinct crowd. At Seen, a laid-back scattering of middle-aged doctors, lawyers and other professionals lounged under sun hats, occasionally checking the time on thick gold watches. At People, the assemblage is as encompassing as the name. College-age women, unshaven Turkish hipsters, patrician older men and vacationing families lay side by side.
But nothing compares to the bacchanal at Mio Beach and the adjacent Na Na beach club, the epicenters of Turkbuku’s gilded youthquake. As a D.J. spun deafening Turkish house and dance music at Mio, a young crowd in long board shorts and Diesel bikinis gyrated to the exotic Middle Eastern polyrhythms, swirling in a blur of tattoos and navel rings. A bleach-blonde woman mounted a white banquette and started to shimmy like a snake as a phalanx of bare-chested guys lounged like Ottoman pashas on colorful neo-sultanic cushions nearby. Rows of red Turkish flags displaying the star and crescent moon fluttered in the breeze.

“Normally,” said Eren Talu, sipping a Scotch and gesturing at the half-filled bay from the hillside terrace of his futuristic Ev Turkbuku hotel, “you can’t see the sea because there are so many yachts and they are so big.”
Speaking in English and French, the sound of dance music pulsating in the background, Mr. Talu, an architect as well as a hotelier, recalled when Paul Allen of Microsoft pulled his 414-foot yacht Octopus into the port, dropping jaws all around.
Mr. Talu held up the front pages of the Turkish daily newspapers Posta and Cumhuriyet, each of which glowed with color photos of celebrities cavorting in the clubs just down the hill.
“It’s like this until 4 a.m. every day of the week from June to September,” he said. “The whole peninsula comes here to party.”
The Ev opened two years ago, the latest of Turkbuku’s growing crop of boutique crash pads aimed at the globe-trotting elite. It includes Maca Kizi, which is owned by Sahir Erozan, a habitué of Washington high society who was behind such trendy restaurants in the capital as Cities and Leftbank, and which offers its own tranquil private beach club.

Visitors seeking a refuge somewhat removed from the party scene hole up at the Ada Hotel. Tastefully outfitted with Ottoman and European antiques, the hotel is the only one in Turkey to be part of the prestigious Relais & Chateaux marketing group. A favorite of Turkish elites for years, the stone, castlelike compound last year won over Mr. Balazs, who called it “a beautifully appointed place” stocked with “great historical pieces.”
But no one in Turkbuku is doing more to teleport the village into the 21st century than Mr. Talu. His Ev Türkbükü, which he also designed, is a totally angular, totally white, totally sci-fi compound of Zen-smooth pools (eight of them) and plasma-screen TV’s (even in the bathrooms). Hovering like a U.F.O. on its hillside perch, the Ev is a Turkish take on Kubrick, a sort of “2001: An Accommodations Odyssey.” You half expect the voice of HAL 9000 to offer you a gin and tonic as you settle into the low, milky couches.
The opening this summer of the equally white Supper Club, a joint venture between Mr. Talu and the Netherlands-based nightclub chain, gave Turkbuku a further injection of global chic. This nightspot joins existing branches in Amsterdam, Rome and San Francisco.
Come dusk, the sun beds and V.I.P. tents along the docks are replaced by elegantly set white tables and twinkling candles, as the beach clubs morph into top dinner spots and cocktail lounges. Bartenders put out bowls of red cherries and yellow plums, the Turkish answer to beer nuts.
For the freshly showered and linen-clad masses, the posted menus of the restaurants along the quay beckon with octopus salads, marinated anchovies, chilled yogurt, olive oil-drenched meze dishes and grilled mullet galore — all to be followed by muddy-sweet Turkish coffee, honey-drenched baklava and gelatinous candy cubes called lokum, or Turkish delight.
Dinner is a mere preamble for Ship Ahoy, a very popular dockside nightclub. In spite of the cheese-baked name and bizarre maritime-chic atmosphere — think “Sex and the City” meets “Gilligan’s Island” — the place draws throngs of Turkish society. Under a gilded scimitar moon in July, there were no pirates with eye patches but plenty of patrons in form-fitting and open-backed white outfits intended to show off the day’s tanning efforts.
As Barry White sang, Turkish guys in suit jackets and Adidas sneakers sipped Miller Genuine Draft stuffed with limes — a ubiquitous local fad — and schmoozed with groups of single women doing their kiz-kiza: girls’ night out.

—

—
This video I made a few years ago, walking at Türkbükü.
—

—-
N e d e r l a n d s:
In maart 2011 vindt u een blog in het Nederlands over Türkbükü en Göl-Türkbükü. http://leensmit.blogspot.com/2011/03/turkbuku-golturkbuku.html