The Founders

Since 1979, Yves had been looking up and down the coast of Turkey while sailing to see if any piece of land could be appropriate to build a sister project to Port Grimaud in France .

He had found no suitable land areas combining:

– Distance maximum 1 hour from an international airport

– at least 1m Sq. M. available flat land on the coast with direct access to the ocean.

– favourable local political support

– a bay sheltered from the dominant NW wind.

However, dreams die hard and he decided to look further North along the coast (previous searches had all been further South in the areas Bodrum to Antalya) and looking carefully at the marine and aerial maps, identified one prospect that looked promising, just south of the village of Alaçatı, near Cesme on the peninsula West of Izmir. 

His father Francois gave him the contact for a retired admiral in the Turkish navy, Admiral Biren, he had met at a show in Cannes. In 1989 Yves came to Istanbul to meet him and in the Intercontinental hotel showed him the area he felt showed promise on the marine map.

This was hugely fortunate since Admiral Biren knew the area, and both the local mayor and possible investors, since Yves needed strong Turkish financial and political backing for such a project.

He kindly offered to travel with Yves at the next opportunity to meet both the local mayor Mr Remzi Özen, and the Özakat family, at the time one of the leading families in Turkey.So here we have the original founders of Port Alaçatı Yves, Admiral Ishik Pasha, Remzi Ozen and Murat Özakat 

The Beginnings

In the early part of 1990, Remzi Bey, Murat and associates came to visit Port Grimaud, partly because such a project was completely new to Turkey and seemed more of a dream than reality.

Yves welcomed the group to Port Grimaud for an extensive tour and explanations as to how and why such a project could even exist, as well and meetings with the architect and founder of Port Grimaud Francois Spoerry.Having seen Port Grimaud with its 2000 houses and apartments and 1500 yachts, the team set about the arduous task of getting such a massive undertaking off the ground. 

The Challenges

The initial challenges were considerable:

• Lack of water. 

At the time (1990) there was insufficient water supply to the whole Cesme peninsula. All the houses were supplied by farmers with their cisterns and tractors and it would be difficult to sell upmarket villas with access to clean running water. This was ultimately solved when Mayor Remzi Bey got approval and financing in …. from the government for a dam just East of Alacati.

• Planning permission

Then as now, no project can go ahead in Turkey without a raft of approvals and licenses from different government agencies in Ankara. Fortunately, Mayor Remzi and the Özakat family had good relationships with many of these offices and gradually gained the most important approvals. The most critical of these was the correction of the administrative shoreline, without which the project would have been impossible.

The original official shoreline, contrary to all logic, ran up the local river (Asmak) for over a kilometre inland. Given that the Turkish law prohibits any construction within 100m of the shoreline, the project could not be developed without a correction of the official shoreline.  This single effort took 2 years to accomplish, with numerous meetings in the smoke-filled government offices in Ankara, with very dubious officials involved.