A coast of traders and sponge divers
Long before anyone sailed here for pleasure, the coast between Bodrum and Fethiye was a working sea. Boats carried goods between harbours and islands, and Bodrum’s sponge divers spent whole summers at sea on sturdy wooden boats built for heavy loads and rough weather.
Our own family comes from that world: our great-grandfathers traded between these islands and then dived for sponges, as we tell in our story. The boats, the bays and the winds of the Blue Voyage were their workplace long before they became a holiday.
The writer who was exiled to Bodrum
In 1925 the writer Cevat Şakir Kabaağaçlı was sentenced to three years of exile in Bodrum, then a quiet fishing town. He fell for the place, stayed long after his sentence ended and wrote about its sea and its people under the name Halikarnas Balıkçısı — the Fisherman of Halicarnassus, after the ancient name of Bodrum.
He sailed into the bays of the Gökova Gulf with local fishermen and sponge divers, and he began to bring friends along: writers, translators and painters who had never seen this coast.
How the Blue Voyage got its name
The first of these trips were made in the mid-1940s: a small group, a local captain, a wooden boat and days spent anchoring in empty coves, swimming, reading and walking to ancient ruins. The classicist Azra Erhat, one of the group, wrote that from 1957 on they sailed every year.
She credited the idea and the name in a single line: if the Fisherman of Halicarnassus founded the Blue Voyage, the writer Sabahattin Eyüboğlu gave it its name. Her book Mavi Yolculuk (“Blue Voyage”), published in 1962, carried that name — and a longing for this coast — to readers all over Turkey.
The painter Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu, Sabahattin’s brother, sailed with them too. In 1974 he painted a fish on a rock in a bay near Göcek; it is still there, and the bay now carries his name. You can see it on our Marmaris to Göcek route.
From workboat to gulet
At the end of the 1960s visitors began to reach Bodrum and Marmaris in growing numbers, and many of them wanted to see the bays the writers had described. At the start of the 1970s Bodrum’s boatbuilders answered with a new kind of boat: the strong wooden hull of the local workboats, with what guests needed added on — a wide, shaded deck, a saloon and cabins below. Our family was among the first to welcome guests aboard.
In the 1980s, as more of them were built, a week on a gulet came within reach of many more people, and the Blue Voyage became the holiday it is today. Gulets are still built largely by hand from local pine, in yards such as those of Bodrum and the village of Bozburun.
The Blue Voyage today
The idea has hardly changed. You spend a week aboard a crewed gulet, wake up in a different bay every day, swim before breakfast, have lunch at anchor and dinner on deck. The routes still follow the coast the writers loved: the Gökova Gulf, the Datça peninsula with ancient Knidos, and the islands of Göcek.
To see the whole map, our guide to every route compares them side by side, and what a gulet is explains life aboard.
