Between the woods and the sea.

It's been a long time since my first blog post, nearly a year, but I've been writing it in my head all the while: the longer I live here, the more I love Ayvalik, and the more I want to write about it.

Here's a little visual context for the Camel Barn Library: this is a photo I took earlier today from up in the pine woods behind the town, on my morning walk with my dog Freddie. It's a terrible photo, for which I apologise, but the reason I'm posting it is that you can see where my house is, just about.



See the mosque - actually an old Greek Orthodox church with a minaret stuck on to it - in the middle of the photo? Look straight down below the mosque and there's a house with a large, yellow ochre side wall, with a line of trees to the right. The yellow ochre house belongs to my next door neighbour, and her yellow ochre wall lies at the end of my courtyard (happily, the bottom half of the wall is bare stone). You can just see the roof of the camel barn in front of the trees, and then the roof of the house, which adjoins the barn at a right angle to form two sides of the courtyard, beyond that. It's a good location to be in: not too high up (the steeper streets in this town are a killer), and midway between the wooded hills behind and the sea - only five minutes walk in either direction.

By the sea you can see the marina - full of beautiful boats belonging to people from Istanbul and elsewhere, who come here in the summer to sail - and the fish market, where the local fishermen come and sell their catch every morning. Some fishermen still tie up on the waterfront in the town centre and sell directly from their boats, attended by patient, ever-hopeful street cats. This photo shows the southern end of Ayvalik: the town centre lies to the north, five minutes walk from the right hand side of the photograph.

So. there we have it: I'm back, and the scene is set. What I really want to write about now is why the local mosque is an old Greek Orthodox church with an added minaret, and that will be the subject of a post in the very near future.