Bekir Usta

Bekir Usta, the legendary master builder who left his mark across the peninsula in the first half of the twentieth century, worked without plan or blueprint, holding the structure in his mind; beside stone he was also a master of woodwork. He carried the local mortar craft of blending aged lime from communally fired kilns with sand and crushed shell. The village school at Cumalı, the two-arched bridge he set over the Ulu stream at Yaka village, and the windmill on Çalıca hill at Yazıköy are among his known works. He died in 1949, aged sixty, in the influenza epidemic that swept the region.

The stone fabric of Old Datça that draws admiration today came from the hands of masters whose names are mostly forgotten; Bekir Usta is a rare representative of that anonymous tradition whose name is known. His bridge, his windmill and his walls stand as proof in stone of how a craft was passed on without school or book — by watching, and by doing.