Akyaka & Gökova

What happens when a poet decides to build a house? Akyaka’s answer reveals itself as you walk its streets… Nail Çakırhan, who wrote poetry in his youth and never trained as an architect, built himself a house on this shore calculating neither like an architect nor like a contractor. He looked to the old houses of the Aegean and thought: wooden bay windows, wide eaves, carved ceilings, white walls… And in 1983 this house won the Aga Khan Award, one of the world’s most prestigious architecture prizes. A poet who never studied architecture winning an architecture award shows, I think, that poetry too is a kind of master builder’s craft.