We are also invited to Alican's wedding up in the hills, which we happily attend until five a.m. Sometime amid the twelve hours of excessive alcohol, dancing, and feasting on Turkish delicacies, I meet an earthy but fashionable Istanbuli. "You have not been to Gümüşlük?" she says, tossing her unruly hair. "Well, that is the real Bodrum." She describes an unspoiled village that is "like Bodrum thirty years ago." After getting her social dose at the Maçakizi, that's where she goes to rent a villa by the sea for her real vacation.

Ayla Emiroğlu's son, Sahir Erozen, is now running the Maçakizi. He is a classic Dean Martin character, chronically telling jokes while holding court under the sail tarp on the sun pier, attended by a pile of blinking cell phones, girls in bikinis, and buckets of rosé. Ipek and I easily convince him to take us to dinner in Gümüşlük. We pick up our fourth—a friend of Sahir's, a Swedish Turk who is spearheading a project with the architect Richard Meier—and then drive past cows and goats lounging in the shade of olive trees and palms, old stone farmhouses among big rocks and stray lilacs. Legend has it that Antony and Cleopatra came ashore in Gümüşlük on their sail to Rome, and even though it's dark when we get there, I can still see why. A few pocket-sized bars have their doors open, spilling light that seems to have been refracted through ambers and reds. We wander alongside the small protected harbor, down a narrow sand path, past tangerine trees and several seafood restaurants, till we reach the restaurant Mimoza. Classical Turkish opera from the 1930s is playing, and the owner, an eccentric Kurd, seats us at a table so close to the sea that if I lean too far to the side I might fall in. The only light comes from beacons on the top of sailboats' masts, the phosphorescence, and the gourd lanterns hanging from the trees.

The conversation turns, as most do in Bodrum these days, to the changing face of the peninsula. "Modern Turkey is only eighty-five years old," says Sahir, referring to when Atatürk abolished the sultanate and remade the faltering country into a secular society. "Being a young nation, Turkey hasn't appreciated the value of its past. It hasn't paid attention to future damages. But now that is changing. Bodrum is no longer an unfound secret with people on donkeys. It has arrived and it is expensive, thank God. You can't build Lego-like houses that sell for thirty or forty thousand dollars anymore." Sahir and his friend run through the laundry list of sexy projects: Singapore-based Banyan Tree is opening a resort in Bodrum; Amanresorts is said to have bought land off a patch of sea between Golkoy and Torba. One of the most ambitious plans is by a Kazakh investment consortium for the seaside between the airport and the fourth-century capital of Milas: Called Kaplankaya, it's a $1.5 billion mixed-use development with a Mandarin Oriental and Ritz-Carlton and high-profile architects including Norman Foster. (When I later see the glossy prospectus, I notice the map shows flying time to Bodrum: four hours from Moscow and five from London.) As we wrap up the evening with glasses of sweet almond liqueur, Sahir muses on this increasing luxury. "It's a hard balance. You don't want to lose the bohemian vibe, but you have to upgrade and add fancy furniture because that's what guests want."