The very first time we came to Calis in 1998 we stayed at Dawn Beach (don't think it had been built very long) there were no shops underneath as there are now and very few across the road, how things have changed in 18 years. Back then the Dolmus terminus was on waste ground next door to the Letoon (where the flats are now) the block paving along the promenade had only just started being laid and the very end was still dirt track, Guven had a small restaurant right at the end of the promenade just past where Obens is, right on the corner, (it is now waste ground), as far as I can remember his mother used to do all the cooking, but it was always a fun night there.
Does anyone remember "Magic" he used to come around the restaurants massaging peoples head and neck and he used to have a place on the beach where you could go for a massage. Then there was "Shoe Shine", he was only a young lad back then, but I read somewhere that he is now married with 3 or 4 children.
A year later a work colleague who also used to visit Calis, recommended the Letoon Hotel to us, even though it was only a two star it was always spotless and we had many fantastic holidays there, I loved the quirkiness of it, it was different to any other place in Calis and the sunsets were to die for. We did miss 3 or 4 years at the time when it really went down, then we heard that the brothers Bora and Yamac, whose father had built the Letoon in 1980 (back then was called Motel Letoon), had taken it back and brought it back to how it used to be, so we went back again in October 2014, but last year when we went in August with all the family we found that it was no longer owned by the brothers (they had only kept it 3 years) and we heard that the people who had bought it were the same people who owned or had bought the Seketur and that the Letoon was also to be demolished.
We haven't been back to Calis every year by no means, (9-10 times in 18 years) so we aren't on a par with a lot of you who have places out there or go 2 or 3 times a year, over the last 18 years we have travelled to other parts of Turkey - Kalkan, Bodrum, Marmaris & Istanbul, but always return to Calis as there is just something there that keeps drawing us back, it feels like home when we arrive there, and is the only place that we have revisited so many times, that is why I could really relate to the article "Damn you Calis Beach"
