Laura Bower looks back on the first-ever edition of Voices

It’s Saturday, 24 September 2005. Tony Blair is Prime Minister, Doctor Who is back on TV screens for the first time since 1989, Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles are newlyweds, and Roger Federer has just beaten Andre Agassi in the US Men’s Open.

About 30,000 people live in Didim, Gima and Tansaş supermarkets have yet to be replaced by Carrefour and Migros, and British people are on a house-buying marathon, shooting up from less than 800 foreign owners in 2004 to over 12,000 by 2007.

The resort is full of restaurants serving up an English breakfast, bars are pulsing with the beats of Hyper Hyper, and everyone, but everyone, has a brother who has a really cheap property for sale.

Surfing on the crest of this wave of Brit-mania comes the very first edition of Altınkum’s new English-language printed newspaper, Voices.

It costs 1.5 YTL. The Turkish lira as we know it won’t exist until 2008 –  the Yeni Turk Lirasi or New Turkish Lira has recently been created by knocking six zeroes off the purple-coloured 1 million lira note (in case you’ve ever wondered why the Million Shop is the Million Shop and not the Lira Shop, that’s why!).

The currency rejig has stabilised foreign exchange rates – it’ll be 8 years before the lira moves out of the 2 or 3 lira-to-the-pound rate it is now. And property prices? There’s an ad in the paper listing a detached villa in Akbük for the princely sum of £29,500.

Voices newspaper is the creation former TV reporter and cameraman Hasan Bayrak, along with a few friends, including Gill Erer and the late Glenn Maffia, who we sadly lost at the start of 2024.

The first edition covers eight pages and features topics ranging from the local to the international. On the front page is “Overcoming the Boundaries of Language”, an article about Didim’s British schoolchildren and their experiences negotiating the Turkish school system and the Turkish language.

Page two features articles about Turkey’s planned accession to the EU, a very dominant topic in the news in 2005: “Turkey unhappy with EU statement”, “Greek Cypriots stall EU’s Turkey declaration”, and “PM urges EU leaders to revise anti-Turkey policies after Merkel failure”.

Page three, not what Sun readers might expect, an article on visitor numbers to Didim, staying longer and “in excess of 7,000” British owners buying properties, according to the “More tourists visit Didim” article.

“Ancient city of Miletos is a cattle haven” highlights the sad state of the museum of Miletus, at this point halfway through an 11-year period of being closed to tourists but very much open to goats and sheep.

Also on page three, “Views from The View”, the first editorial by Glenn Maffia, highlighting the property boom and the bounty it’s bringing to Didim, and lamenting the obstacles being thrown in the way of the foreign property buyers who are the source of this newfound fortune.

Page four and five have a two-page spread on a meeting between 60 foreign residents of Didim and the long-standing mayor of the time, Mümin Kamacı. Attending the meeting is someone whose name might be familiar to Turkish-language students and yacht enthusiasts, Beverly Çakmakçı, who reminisces about the old days in Didim elsewhere in our 20th anniversary edition.

The concerns of Didim’s foreign population at the time include whether Altınkum would turn into “Little Britain” or a Turkish version of the Spanish Costas, reducing the time taken for foreign property buyers to receive their title deeds (at this time sometimes taking over a year for authorisation to come through from the Aegean Army), the hassling of passers-by from bars and restaurants (those who were here in 2005 might remember “running the gauntlet” to get from one end of Altınkum Beach to the other!), noise pollution and traffic, and the state of the roads.

On the Turkish side, the mayor announces that the council will be putting on Turkish lessons for foreigners, and another Turkish attendee says that he hoped foreign residents of Altınkum will try to learn more about their host culture.

This very first edition of Voices also has a letters page, My Voice, where a reader known only as Keith expresses his frustration at having to stay in a lightless, waterless Dark Ages-themed holiday home thanks to a five-month-and-counting wait for his title deeds.

Keith shares space with, believe it or not, Ian Botham, who is enjoying watching the Ashes Test Series from Sky Bar in 2005! In the neighbouring space is a piece of investment advice recommending that readers, rather than putting their lira in a standard interest account earning 1% interest per month, should instead invest in government bonds at 1.35%. That’s a bit of a difference to the substantial double-digits enjoyed by lira investors in 2025!

Page 7 has an update on the English Premier League (Abramovitch’s Chelsea, Souness’ Newcastle, Sol Campbell, Roy Keane and Thierry Henry all featured), and an article on Kill Bill actress Chiaki Kuriyama’s visit to Café Olive in Akköy, filming a documentary on Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus, with Akköy resident and Cafe Olive owner Erkin İlgüzer.

The last page of that history-making first issue of Voices features an announcement, “Didim to be promoted at the World’s Largest Travel Fair” in London in November 2005, the World Travel Market.

Hasan Bayrak, Gill Erer and Glenn Maffia of Voices are also creating a tourism guide for Didim to be distributed at the fair. Also on the last page, an advert from Choices Real Estate featuring that £29,000 semi-detached villa in Akbük, a two-bed apartment 20 metres from the beach for £30,000, and a luxury villa in Altınkum for £80,000, properties which would cost many multiples of those amounts if you were to buy them in 2025.

So many things have changed in Didim since that first edition. The number of foreign residents has dropped dramatically, down to around 1,200 according to Sami Işık in a recent Voices issue.

The value of the Turkish lira has also plummeted, while the value of property in any currency has shot up immensely. Turkey’s candidacy for EU membership has stalled. And some things stay the same, or at least similar in nature if not identical in form – foreign visitors still face bureaucratic obstacles to making Turkey their full-time home, the state of the roads is always a talking point, and if you look very carefully you might see Beverly sailing along the coast or Ian Botham watching the cricket at Sky Bar!

Were you in Didim in 2005? Do you prefer the town now or back then? What changes have you seen and what would you like to see? Contact us at info@voicesnewspaper.com.