The Mediterranean can be entered from many points. Lisbon, Gibraltar, Marseille, Genoa, Barcelona: any of these would work logistically as a starting point for a five-year circumnavigation that sails the Mediterranean east-to-west before turning south for the Atlantic. The flights from Belgium are manageable. The marina infrastructure is excellent. The provisioning is reliable. There is no purely practical reason to start at the eastern end of the sea rather than the middle or the western end.
We chose Bodrum. And the reason we chose Bodrum is not practical. It is about what it means to begin something correctly, and about the specific character that a beginning gives to everything that follows it.
The Practical Argument First
The practical argument for Bodrum is real, even if it is not the primary one. Starting at the eastern end of the Mediterranean in April means sailing west with the prevailing wind and current through the season: Turkey and Greece in April and May before the Meltemi establishes itself, the Aegean in June, the Adriatic in July, the Tyrrhenian and the western Med in August, the Spanish coast and the Balearics in September, Gibraltar and the approach to the Atlantic in October. This sequence puts the boat in the right place at the right time at every stage of the Mediterranean season. Starting anywhere further west compresses the eastern section into conditions or a timing that shortchanges it.
The Turkish coast in spring is also one of the finest sailing grounds in the Mediterranean, and one of the most underrated by northern European sailors who tend to think of the Med as Greece and Croatia and miss the Gokova Gulf and the Bozburun Peninsula and the specific quality of the Turkish coast in May when the mountains are still snow-capped above the pine forest and the anchorages are empty and the water is already warm enough to swim. Starting here means beginning the circumnavigation in one of its best moments rather than working up to it.
The Character Argument
Bodrum sits at the junction of the Aegean and the Mediterranean, at the point where Europe and Asia face each other across a body of water narrow enough to swim and wide enough to mean something. It has been a crossing point for three thousand years. The Persians crossed from this coast to attack Greece. The Greeks colonised from this coast into Asia Minor.
The Crusader knights built the castle that still defines the town’s skyline, using stone from the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, which stood on the hill above the harbour until the Crusaders dismantled it for building material. The Roman Empire crossed back and forth through these waters. The Byzantine Empire after them. The Ottomans after them. The Aegean and the people on both sides of it have been in continuous, complicated, consequential relationship for longer than most of the history most people know.
Starting a five-year voyage in this place rather than in Barcelona or Marseille or Genoa means beginning with three thousand years of maritime history immediately present rather than gradually accumulated as the route proceeds. The first anchorage of the circumnavigation is in waters that have been sailed since before the alphabet existed.
The first morning in the first bay is a morning in a place that carries the accumulated weight of all that crossing and all those centuries. That weight does not make the coffee taste different. But it puts the voyage in a context that the Atlantic crossing and the Pacific and everything that follows deserve to be in from the beginning.
The Edge
There is something specific about beginning at an edge. Barcelona is the middle of the European coastline: established, continuous, part of the main. Bodrum is the far eastern end of Europe’s navigable relationship with the Mediterranean, the point where the familiar becomes the unfamiliar, where the road signs change alphabet and the muezzin replaces the church bell and the food has a different logic to it and the approach to the sea has been shaped by a different thousand years of practice.
A voyage that begins at an edge begins with a specific quality of opening rather than continuation. There is nothing more eastern to explore before we start going west. The route ahead is the whole Mediterranean, and beyond it the Atlantic, and beyond that the Pacific, and beyond that everything. The beginning is a genuine beginning rather than a midpoint arbitrarily designated as the start. Bodrum is the edge. The voyage begins at the edge. Everything else is what lies on the other side of it.
I have started from Bodrum enough times now to understand that this is not romantic reasoning. It is accurate reasoning about what a place does to the quality of a beginning. The first morning of every season in the Bodrum anchorage, with the castle above and the Turkish mountains behind and the Aegean opening to the west: this is the right beginning. Not because it is the most comfortable or the most convenient or the most logical by any purely operational calculation. Because it is the truest. And beginnings should be true.
