Bodrum's most beloved symbol is the white stone houses with indigo-blue jambs. The first thing that comes to mind is a street that opens to the deep blue sea and is sprinkled with purple. Houses sprinkled with these delicious colors are unique to the Bodrum peninsula in the Anatolian architectural tradition. Flat-roofed cube houses with earlobes on the corners started to seem more interesting to me, especially after I started living here, because it rains like torrents in the winter. In a geography where it rains so much, building a flat roof, and with natural materials, keeps reinforcing the question of why. From the sources I read, I understood that many types of structures found on the peninsula stem from geographical difficulties.
In the 12th century, Turkmens escaping from the Mongol invasion settled in Bodrum. Since they had not lived in a settled life before, they started using the houses of the locals who had escaped from them. The traditional Turkish House is shaped according to the large family, while Bodrum Houses are suitable for the nuclear family. All elements of the houses such as their dimensions, heights, windows and doors come from the dimensions of the building materials. These building materials do not allow for very wide openings since they are carried from the outer regions on animal backs.
In addition, the domed aboveground cisterns frequently seen in this region were actually built at certain intervals along the route to meet the water needs of animals.
Cengiz Bektaş classified these houses for the first time with his study in 1972. He describes and documents 3 types of houses as Tower House, Musandıralı House and Chios Type House.
Before cisterns, mills and tower houses, I wanted to write about Greek Houses, which intrigued me even more. For some reason, these houses are rarely mentioned.
Unlike today, there are many buildings with roofs in old Bodrum photographs. When we look closely, we see that they are tiled, have gable roofs, and have neoclassical decorations on the eaves and corners.
These houses, which I define as Greek Houses, are also called 4-room house types. They are generally 2-storey and have high ceilings. The ceilings of traditional stone houses are quite low. It is thought that merchants involved in sea trade and sponge diving at the beginning of the 20th century or administrators of the Ottoman period had these houses built by foreign masters. When the Greeks left the peninsula in 1925, these masters also left and no other houses were built. This theory also suggests that these houses were the expertise of Greek masters rather than imported masters. We see exquisitely decorated doors in some of them. Decorations can be seen mostly on the ceilings or skirtings.
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