Summers Past: Three Gardens, Kıyıköy, Turkish Thrace

Three gardens in the town of Kıyıköy on the Black Sea coast of Turkish Thrace.

Kıyıköy — literally: “coastal settlement” — is the all-too-obvious modern Turkish name for the ancient Greek Black Sea port and walled settlement of Medea.  By late-Ottoman times, the town, eventually known as Midye — Turkish for “mussel” — was populated in large part by Greeks, whose lives and livelihoods (fishing and coastal shipping) faced seaward, and by Bulgarians, whose lives and livelihoods (dairy production and garden farming) faced inland.  Bulgarians left Midye during and after the Balkan Wars of the 1910s, and Greeks in the forced population exchanges that followed Turkey’s war of independence in the 1920s.  Demographics have changed — today’s Kıyıköy appears to be populated by Turks and Roma — but the part-Byzantine and part-Ottoman walls of the town still stand and still mark its periphery, and Kıyıköy’s rarely-frequented harbor still provides safe haven from the capricious currents of the Black Sea.

The three gardens portrayed herein are set in the expanse between Kıyıköy’s formerly-Greek town center and its still-extant town walls.  At the top: the front garden of the home of a Roma family.  Middle: A backyard vegetable garden.  Last: A solitary pupil in the playground of a private kindergarten awaiting the imminent start of the school year.  All three photos were taken in 2013. The camera: My usual Fuji X100 with and without a wide-angle conversion lens.