Orhan (Kemal) Karadağlı

Orhan Karadağlı served thirty years as headman of Old Datça and ran "Orhan's Coffeehouse" at the entrance of the village — for generations the meeting point of Datça locals and of anyone who wandered in. He is the person who brought Can Yücel to Datça in the early 1990s, helping the poet find a house and put down roots, and remained his close friend to the end. In his final election as headman the vote tied at 138 to 138 and the result was decided by drawing lots. He died in 2023.

Behind Datça's identity as a "poets' town" stand a headman and a coffeehouse that few people know about. Can Yücel's settling in this village did not happen by itself; it happened through Karadağlı's friendship. When the poet died, he closed his coffeehouse for a month. The "Can Baba" corner in that coffeehouse — photographs, portraits, poems — remains something like a small museum of the village's collective memory.