Azra Erhat

Azra Erhat — who with A. Kadir translated Homer's Iliad and Odyssey into Turkish, and who wrote the standard Turkish "Dictionary of Mythology" — was, together with Halikarnas Balıkçısı and Sabahattin Eyüboğlu, a founder of the Blue Anatolia movement. In "Mavi Yolculuk" (Blue Voyage), her account of the sea journeys she began making in the 1940s, Datça and Knidos are given generous space; the Knidos pages are among the book's best-loved passages. (Her life was centred on Istanbul; like the Fisherman's, her tie to Datça is literary and intellectual.)

As the female pen of Blue Voyage literature she fixed Knidos in the classic texts of the Turkish essay. Her narrative, balancing the Fisherman's exuberance with a scholar's rigour, is one of the sources of the cultivated curiosity that fills the boats sailing Datça's shores today.