It’s time for another monthly news roundup of life in Fethiye and March is most definitely the month of prep!
Prep for the summer season. Drills, angle grinders – lots of angle grinders – sanders, paint brushes and rollers.
There’s barely a hotel, restaurant or boat that isn’t having – or hasn’t had – some sort of spruce up, be it complete refurb or a wipe down and a lick of paint.
But, of course, it’s also springtime and that means the beautiful wisteria and mimosa is in full bloom. Orange and lemon blossom is bursting from bud to flower.
Colours and sights and smells that are guaranteed to lift the spirits – and the strips of antihistamines in full use.
The Boats Are Waiting
It’s not particularly summer weather at the moment – it’s warm but it’s cloudy, damp and windy.
However, all that will change and the Çalış Boat Cooperative now has most of its boats back in the water, ready for the start of the summer 2025 season.
They’re hoping to start proceedings next week.
One of the top things to do in Fethiye is to do a daily boat trip or to take the Çalıs water taxi across the bay – we love that little sail – and we wish them all a great season.
A Wander Over The Hill
The weather in Fethiye through March has been a mixed bag of extremes.
The usual March mix of springtime showers, winds and sunshine were interrupted by both a mini heatwave and wintery cold spell in quick succession.
The mini heatwave saw temps jump from the early teens to 28 degrees for a few days.
We made the most of it, jumping on the local dolmuş over to the resort of Ölüdeniz for a weekend day by the beach.
And as you can see in the photo, quite a few other people had the same idea.
No beds and umbrellas out along Belcekiz Beach at this time of year and it was lovely to see everyone everyone just chilling out along the coastline.
Festival Season
After the Muslim holy month of Ramazan – and a month of enjoying the special bread, Ramazan pidesi – the festivals are now coming in thick and fast.
First of all, it was declared that the 3 day festival, Ramazan Bayramı (Eid al-Fitr) is going to be a 9 day holiday this year so the holiday will continue into next weekend.
More time for families to enjoy all the Turkish sweet treats that are a feature of this holiday.
And we also have a few upcoming diary dates for you – keep your eye on our Fethiye events calendar for local events that might be taking place when you’re in the area.
Because Ramazan fell in March this year, some events that usually take place in March have been put back to April.
National Sport
We did, however, have a national sporting event that took place over the penultimate weekend of March when we were treated to the Turkish Long Distance Rowing Cup.
Rowing clubs from around the country set up their stations along Çalış Beach and male and female teams rowed various distances, both along the coastline and out and back, away from the coastline.
As you might expect from its geographical location – and size – there were numerous teams from Istanbul.
Local Food Festivals
The Göcek Ot Festivali – Göcek Herb Festival – usually takes place in March.
That will now take place next weekend on 5th and 6th April (now put back again until the 20th April due to bad weather) and is a lovely event if you’re in the area.
Unfortunately, we’ll miss it this year because Turkish running events that usually take place in March were rearranged for April so we’ll be in Antalya for the 20th Runtalya Marathon on that weekend.
And because it’s so popular these days, we’ve added the 3-day Yeşil Üzümlü Mushroom Festival to our page of top Turkish festivals and events.
This year’s festival, in celebration of morel mushrooms (kuzu göbeği) and the local dastar silk weave, will take place over the weekend of 11th-13th April.
Out & About
We tried a new eatery that has just arrived on the Fethiye eating and drinking scene in March.
If you follow the blog a lot, you’ll know we’re partial to a yummy Turkish pide. Especially kuşbaşılı pide.
Well, we now have a new place to go when we’re around the Çalış sunday market area.
We’ll be doing our review of that place, soon…after we’ve also sampled their Adana kebabs.
Elsewhere on the food and drink scene along Yerguzlar Caddesi, another of the places we like to go to, Can Çekti, has doubled its space by taking over the fishmonger’s space next door (the fishmonger has another space not too far away on a side street).
In The Kitchen
Despite some cold snaps where overnight temps once more hit zero for a couple of nights, we’ve been pressing on with being in spring mode.
No going back once you’ve started, is there?
So, salad recipes have been in the offing.
A lovely white bean piyaz to go with griddled köfte.
And we treated ourselves to a lamb steak one night just to go with a Turkish potato salad because baby potatoes are out on the local markets.
And we don’t know why, but for us, falafel is warmer weather food and we did our first homemade falafel of the warmer-weather-season in March.
A perfect vegetarian or vegan dish – and just downright delicious for omnivores, too.
On The Blog
The blog is a constant and we’re always updating existing articles, adding new articles and photos. Some of the main updates in March were:
New Recipe
And also in the kitchen, we were able to add a new recipe to the blog.
Our local markets in Fethiye are selling more bell peppers, these days, so we’ve been playing around with more stuffed peppers recipes.
These Mediterranean stuffed peppers are vegetarian and make use of a few of our favourite Turkish ingredients – and you could even use our Turkish spice blend as a quick way to add your herbs and spices to the filling.
Morel Mushroom Celebration
As you saw above, the Üzümlü Mushroom Festival is coming up in April and that is in celebration of morel mushroom season.
It’s only right then that we have an article on the blog that also has a morel mushrooms recipe. Should you be lucky enough to get your hands on any…
Long-Overdue Update For A Favourite
Back in 2016, a restaurant specialising in meat and steaks opened along Fethiye harbour.
We went along and wrote our review.
Since then, Çarıklı Et Restaurant has become one of our favourite restaurants.
Our most recent meal there was for my birthday at the end of February.
And, at long last, that prompted us to update our review of Çarıklı Et Restaurant.
Beaches For 2025
And lots of us love a day at the beach.
Nothing stays still for long in Fethiye and that’s certainly true of the beach scene.
We’ve brought our guide to Fethiye beaches right up to date for the upcoming summer season.
Fethiyespor
As usual for Fethiyespor, March was a mixed bag of results: A home win, two away losses, an away draw and a cancellation.
You can see the scores and remaining fixtures, here, if you want to go along and give them your support.
And the league standings look like this – with Fethiyespor seemingly glued to 9th place.
In Other News
Not necessarily Fethiye news – but just some random stories that have stood out for us over the past month…
Water’s Flowing
There is an ongoing project around the country to restore the ancient fountains of archaeological sites and bring life to them.
Sagalassos ancient city has had a flowing fountain for some time.
Ancient Kibyra and Antalya’s Perge also have flowing water, too.
The latest ancient site to get the water treatment is Patara, capital of the Lycian League.
Excavations will begin around the gate area this year and, eventually, water will once more flow through the ancient city gate, the Arch of Mettius Modestus.
Food Fusion
We love how food evolves – and this usually happens over years as a result of people migrating around the world.
And now we have some British-Turkish fusion.
As we’re from the northwest UK town of Wigan where we are famous for pies – our favourite is a traditional meat and potato pie – when National Pie Week was taking place in March we were interested to see which pie would win the award for Britain’s Pie of Pies.
Ladies and gentlemen, the winner of Britain’s Pie of Pies award was…a Scottish döner kebab pie!
We love a good quality Turkish döner kebab.
We’d give the Scottish döner kebab pie a go. Why not?
Yaren Returns
Regular readers with good memories will know that for the last couple of years, we’ve written about Yaren Leylek (Yaren the Stork) who migrates to the northwest of the country each spring and visits local fisherman Adem Amca.
Yaren is now famous countrywide. And in a world where good news is currently much needed, we all waited to see if Yaren would once more return to visit Adem on his boat as he has done for the last 13 years.
He kept us waiting…but eventually on 14th March, photographers captured Yaren’s return to Adem amca – and everyone breathed a collective sigh of relief!
Into April
Our first break of 2025 will be in April. Very much looking forward to that despite a questionable weather forecast.
Let’s see what the rest of the month brings…