What is a Blue Cruise? The Turkish 'Mavi Yolculuk', explained

Search for a Turkish charter and the phrase appears everywhere: Blue Cruise, Blue Voyage, Mavi Yolculuk. It is not a route or a product. It is a tradition with a specific beginning, and understanding it explains why the Turkish coast charters the way it does.

A writer in exile

In 1925 the writer Cevat Şakir Kabaağaçlı was sentenced to internal exile in Bodrum, then a fishing village with a castle and no road worth the name. He stayed by choice for the rest of his life, took the pen name Halikarnas Balıkçısı (the Fisherman of Halicarnassus) and wrote about the coast and the sponge divers' boats that worked it. In the 1950s he and his friends, among them the essayist Azra Erhat, began taking those boats out for weeks at a time along the Carian coast, sleeping on deck, swimming in bays no road reached and reading the ancient sites from the water. Erhat's book about those voyages gave the practice its name.

From sponge boat to gulet

The boats were working craft, and the first guests slept on the hatches. Through the 1970s the yards at Bodrum and Bozburun began building the same broad hulls with cabins, galleys and shade, and the gulet as a charter yacht was born. By the 1980s the Blue Cruise was the Turkish summer, and the coast from Bodrum to Antalya its stage.

What it means today

A Blue Cruise is a crewed week along the Turkish coast on a motor sailor, lived mostly on deck and in the water: a morning swim, a passage of an hour or two, lunch at anchor, an afternoon in another bay, dinner aboard or at a taverna with its own jetty. The route is loose by design; the captain reads the wind and the guests. The term is sometimes used for cabin charters sold by the berth, but on a private charter the whole yacht is yours.

How it differs from a Greek island charter

Greek charters are built around harbours: an island a day, a quay in the evening, a village to walk. The Blue Cruise is built around bays: fewer towns, more swimming, nights at anchor under pines. Many guests want both, and the geography allows it; the two coasts face each other across a few miles. Our Bodrum to Rhodes route is the usual way to combine them.

The classic Blue Cruise routes

• Bodrum and the Gulf of Gökova: the original voyage: Çökertme, Sedir Island, English Harbour, Yedi Adalar.
• Marmaris, Hisarönü and Datça: the Carian coast proper, ending at Knidos. See the Datça guide.
• Göcek and the Gulf of Fethiye: the most sheltered water on the coast and the Twelve Islands.
• Fethiye to Kaş and Kekova: the Lycian coast, cliffs and the sunken city.

Which yacht

By definition a motor sailor; the gulet or motor yacht question answers itself here. The ones in our fleet range from four-cabin family boats to forty-metre yachts with a crew of eight, and every one of them was built within sight of where the first voyage began.