Evening comes down slowly at Gümüşlük. Even after the sun has gone behind the island the air stays orange for a while, then turns blue all at once. On the path to the quarry there is loose stone underfoot; stepping inside, the first thing you meet is the cool — after a shoreline that has been warming all day, the shade of cut rock holds a different temperature altogether. The chairs are set out. The piano waits in front of a flat face that somebody left with a chisel two thousand years ago.
Then someone begins to play, and the sound goes to the wall and comes back.
The quarry
The Koyunbaba quarry was one of this coast’s sources of building stone in antiquity; some of the stone of Bodrum and the country around it came out of here. You can still see where blocks were levered away, the chisel marks, cuts left half finished. This is not a venue built for concerts — it is a workplace, abandoned. Nobody calculated the acoustics either; the angles of the cut faces are whatever the quarrymen happened to leave. Sometimes the result is better than a designed hall.
Gümüşlük itself sits on ancient Myndos. The submerged causeway out to Rabbit Island at the end of the bay is still there; on a calm day, or when the water is low, you can see it passing beneath you as you swim. Figures given for its age vary with the source, but the causeway is not in doubt: roughly a hundred and fifty metres, narrow, and well made.
This summer
The twenty-third edition opened on 17 July and runs until 6 September. This year’s programme holds eighteen concerts, three of them masterclass performances. The concerts are grouped under the headings “In Water, In Sand, In Stone” — the names describe the venues well enough that nothing needs explaining. The closing night is a trio: Gülsin Onay, Erkin Onay and Denis Shapovalov. Piano masterclasses run at the quarry through August as well, and some of those evenings are open to listeners.
Dates can shift over the season; it is worth checking the programme before you go.
Arriving by sea
You can reach Gümüşlük by road, but the evening traffic and the business of parking take the edge off it. Boats anchor in the bay, guests go ashore by tender, and after the concert they come back the same way. The bay is shallow and the bottom is seagrass in places — the anchor spot wants choosing. For the few boats that stay once the concert has ended and everyone has gone, the best hour at Gümüşlük begins: the music over, the lights off, only the sound of water.
On the way out, if you stand a moment at the mouth of the quarry, you notice the stone is still giving back the heat it gathered all day.
DAY CHARTERS →