Alacati
Greek Built Aegean Stone Village On The Cesme Peninsula, Now A Protected Historic Quarter And One Of The World'S Leading Windsurfing Bays · Cesme, Izmir
Alacati was a Greek village built of cut stone with carved window surrounds and blue shutters, emptied in the 1923 population exchange and half-forgotten for seventy years. What brought it back was the wind. The bay five kilometres south is one of the most reliable flat-water windsurfing sites in the world - shallow, side-onshore, blowing almost every afternoon from May to September - and the schools that grew up there in the 1990s brought the people who then restored the village. Now the stone houses are boutique hotels, the lanes are cobbled and swept, and the breakfast is the most expensive in Turkiye. It is genuinely beautiful and it is thoroughly discovered: in August the lanes are a slow-moving crowd and the prices are Istanbul's. Come in May or late September, or come for the wind and stay near the bay. The village is genuinely beautiful and it stopped being anybody's secret a long time ago.
Alacati Mahallesi, Cesme, Izmir, Cesme, Izmir, Turkiye
The village is lived in and open at all hours. Shops, restaurants and hotels run from about April to October at full tilt and a share closes in winter. The windsurfing schools on the bay operate roughly April to November, with the most reliable wind from May to September. The herb festival is in April and fills every bed on the peninsula.