Bodrum: Ancient Stones, Modern Appetites

Between visits to The Bodrum EDITION, Susona Bodrum, LXR Hotels & Resorts, and METT, Douglas Blyde dines at Ruins and Maçakızı and discovers a peninsula of ancient stone, ambitious cooking, old money and modern excess. ‘When you reach the top of the hill, you will see Bodrum. Don’t assume that you will leave as you came,’ wrote Cevat Şakir Kabaağaçlı, exiled here a century ago after a controversial article about condemned military deserters. As Halikarnas Balıkçısı, the Fisherman of Halicarnassus, he turned punishment into a lifelong attachment to the Aegean and helped inspire the Blue Voyage. The advice still works. Keep moving, and do not mistake the peninsula for a single town.Bodrum is a geography of competing appetites: Torba’s pine-backed coves, Yalıkavak’s marina money, Bodrum town’s maritime grit, Gümüşlük’s low-slung dinners and Gümbet’s amplifier-fuelled strip.Thankfully, Ibiza, Mykonos, Saint-Tropez and Dubai still absorb much of influencer culture’s heavy artillery. Bodrum has its share of people apparently holidaying for the benefit of digital strangers, but its better corners retain a distinctly Turkish pulse.September may be the clever month. The sea has banked the summer heat, restaurants are still running and high-season traffic has loosened its grip.The Bodrum EDITION PRESS HANDOUTThe Bodrum EDITION: polish, interrupted by placeDrive west through immaculate Yalıkavak, past the marina’s floating palaces of money and chrome, to The Bodrum EDITION on Tilkicik Bay.Over a drink at the beach bar, Federico Penzo, who arrived in 2018, described how quickly the surrounding hills have filled with resorts. EDITION itself folds into one of those slopes, descending towards the sea like a particularly well-funded village. The stairs provide useful penance for lunch; buggies exist for anyone unwilling to repent twice.Our Deluxe Sea View room came in the brand’s full spectrum of beige, improved by a very good lemon and olive-oil cake.At the bottom lies the stronger reason to be here: a calm sandy bay, unusually sheltered from the winds that trouble much of the peninsula, where white marble pebbles gleam beneath the water and shoals of tiny silver fish nose around your ankles. The beach draws a well-heeled procession of camera-ready faces, handsome cover-ups and expensive sunglasses, yet remains more polished than aggressively party-driven.The Bodrum EDITIONDouglas BlydeBreakfast is excellent, particularly the gözleme rolled out, filled and cooked in front of you. Michelin-starred KITCHEN by Osman Sezener supplies the serious gastronomic machinery. Its tasting menu is at its best when Turkish ingredients disturb the international fine-dining grammar: local shrimp, satsuma, tarhana and mastic interested me more than avocado and truffle.Senior sommelier, Merve Ceren Bıçak, Türkiye’s Best Young Sommelier 2026, went further, replacing the usual mixed pairing with an entirely Turkish one for us. Paşaeli Emir, from ungrafted Cappadocian vines, and Likya Arkeo Acıkara made indigenous grapes feel not like dutiful local excursions but the obvious wines to drink.Merve Ceren BıçakDouglas BlydeDAHA is more emphatically rooted. Third-generation chef Mehmet Akdağ, from Antalya institution 7Mehmet, sends out Circassian fish, elegant kokoreç and superb charcoal-grilled goat chops. A pudding of pumpkin, walnut, double-roasted tahini and water-buffalo clotted cream, drawn from a family recipe dating to 1937, was the most luxurious dessert I ate in Türkiye. Down by the water, Morena loosens the tie. Its pide received the sterner judgement of my eight-year-old daughter: the best pizza she had ever eaten.Penzo’s Back to Roots cocktail programme follows the same instinct. His Satsuma Smash takes Bodrum mandarins, gin, cucumber, lime and salted sour plum and makes considerable effort taste effortless.That is EDITION at its best. The beige rooms, brand polish and immaculate service could travel.The bay, gözleme, goat, Acıkara, tarhana and mandarins could not. Ruins Luxury Resort PRESS HANDOUTA wedding was absolutely banging on the shoreline below while Miraj, upstairs, appeared to have reopened after its advertised seasonal closure for precisely three diners: us. In front of us, Mercedes three-pointed stars were stamped into the pool loungers. Caraway-scented bread, beef tartare and excellent wild sea bass cooked over coals were accompanied by a chef attacking the pass bell with the urgency of 150 covers rather than three. Ruins Luxury ResortDouglas BlydeAfterwards, the route led unexpectedly through an exhibition hall. The Body After Desire, a Muse Contemporary group show curated by Taner Yılmaz, explored the body as something continually reshaped by technology, aesthetics, nature and cultural memory.Beyond it, Sips, Barcelona’s No. 3 bar in Europe for 2026, delivered a Metate Margarita with one final surreal detail: a child in an official Sips T-shirt brought it over.Bodrum can be simultaneously overproduced and wonderfully odd.PRESS HANDOUTSusona: the corporate resort that became humanHead east to Torba and Susona Bodrum, LXR Hotels & Resorts, where around 70 rooms, suites and villas disappear into planted grounds descending towards jetties and a private cove.Even at capacity, it rarely feels busy.At Suyah, a playful pool comes with a sunken bar, inflatable flamingoes and midye dolma. The spa has a hammam, a jacuzzi beneath a glazed dome and steam rooms capable of removing most remaining evidence of civilisation.Our King Deluxe Room had its own garden, partial sea view and a private-residence feel. The vast bath faced the buggy route but was entirely secluded, provided one remembered the floor-to-ceiling blinds before embarking upon contemplation.Susona Bodrum, LXR Hotels & Resorts Douglas BlydeThe more interesting story is management.Volkan Amaç arrived as general manager in July 2025 after seven years running Hilton Kyiv. When minor problems arose, he dealt with them quietly rather than staging the usual operetta of service recovery.Under Amaç, Susona opened OctoZen, placing Japanese-influenced seafood against the sunset. Malva, meanwhile, looks inward: micro-local sourcing, zero-waste thinking and a Michelin-recognised kitchen built around Turkish produce.Susona Bodrum, LXR Hotels & ResortsDouglas BlydeA meal ranged from concentrated tomato to Mersin shrimp, ribeye mantı and dry-aged leer fish. A bottle-aged Suvla Reserve Karasakız from Çanakkale was smoky, savoury and unexpectedly evolved.But Susona’s appeal extends beyond the plate and glass.At breakfast I watched a cat drink directly from the infinity pool, either an endorsement of its cleanliness or a relaxed interpretation of pool etiquette. When the hotel closes, security staff continue feeding the cats and arrange veterinary care.Turndown brought knitted mermaids one night and white-chocolate eggs with miniature hammers the next, cracking open to reveal jelly babies. Susona, it seemed, had layers.For a resort with considerable corporate architecture behind it, Susona is most persuasive when it feels unexpectedly human. METT Hotel & Beach Resort BodrumPRESS HANDOUTMETT: when hospitality becomes terms and conditionsIt belongs to Dubai-based Sunset Hospitality Group, whose international expansion now sits alongside a more complicated picture in London, where the operator of its 19 Motcomb Street complex entered liquidation this month.A wonderful experience at the group’s Singapore property had prompted us to seek out its Bodrum incarnation.The setting promised plenty. The pool looked inviting from afar and the beach was attractively dressed. Folie supplies the extroversion, staging its signature Vintage Circus every Wednesday in season, a daytime party of music, performance and spectacle.Yet a hosted programme arranged to assess the restaurants became strangely restrictive in practice, with choice giving way to prescribed menus and limits.It pushed us back into Bodrum.Chapel inside Bodrum CastleDouglas BlydeThe castle, mausoleum, theatre, marketplace and marina were all close enough to reclaim the itinerary.Bodrum Castle rose under the Knights of St John from 1402. More startling than its English, French, German and Italian towers is what helped build them: stone quarried from the nearby Mausoleum of Halicarnassus.That monument, erected in the fourth century BC for Mausolus and Artemisia II, became one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and gave the English language the word ‘mausoleum’.One civilisation built a monument to dynastic grief. Another dismantled it to strengthen a fortress. After the Ottoman conquest, the castle chapel became a mosque.Pagan ambition, crusader opportunism and Ottoman absorption occupy the same hill.Nearby, the ancient theatre looks over what was once Halicarnassus towards the sea. Two and a half millennia suddenly feel irritatingly brief.That evening, we drove north to one of Bodrum’s most deeply rooted institutions.Maçakızı HotelPRESS HANDOUTMaçakızı: luxury before the luxury boomGetting to Maçakızı hardly announces the legend. A narrowing road curls towards Türkbükü, dogs sleeping unconcernedly at its edges. Then the path widens onto retractable sails and the Aegean below.Ayla Emiroğlu opened the original Maçakızı in 1977; her son, Sahir Erozan, brought it here in 2000. The name means Queen of Spades, hence the emblem.Bougainvillea, olive trees and terraces falling towards the water make it feel accumulated rather than installed.Longstanding general manager, Andrew Jacobs knows the elite of Bodrum and beyond, down to the tables they favour. The clientele felt old money, helped by prices calibrated to gatekeep.Aret Sahakyan has shaped the kitchen since 2000. His modern Aegean cooking holds a Michelin star, while The World’s 50 Best Hotels 2026 Extended List placed Maçakızı at No. 76.Dinner brought sea bass tartare with sour-cherry molasses and sumac, grilled octopus, excellent linguine mobbed with vongole and Aegean pink shrimp with saffron risotto.Service came in formidable numbers. The waiters were warm, if not invariably precise; sommelier, Mehmet very much was. I had been told that only house wine would be included, so I had driven rather than booked a taxi. That made his choice of Cuvée Marcel Biron Papaskarası from Chamlija slightly torturous. He called it one of Türkiye’s best wines.Whole fish were filleted tableside, sodium-coloured lamps glowed and a resident cat suddenly clawed at our tabletop, the evening’s least choreographed intervention. Across the bay, the call to prayer punctuated the hubbub.Its greatest luxury may simply be confidence.METT had made us think about the terms of hospitality.Maçakızı simply practised it.This is not luxury imported into Bodrum. It helped invent the modern version.Cevat Şakir warned that you could not leave as you arrived.Turkish pop star Tarkan provides the contemporary reply: the froth passes; the sea, the stone and the appetite remain.‘Geççek, geççek, elbet bu da geççek.’