Bozcaada (Tenedos)

Tenedos appears several times in Homer's Iliad. Apollo rules over it in the opening book. The poem itself stops before the fall of Troy, so the famous wooden horse and the Greek fleet hiding at Tenedos belong to a later telling of the story.

Virgil describes the scene in Book II of the Aeneid. The Greeks seem to have given up the war and sailed away. Instead, they withdraw to Tenedos. The Trojans see an empty shore, assume the siege is finally over, and bring the horse inside their walls.

Look at a map and Tenedos suddenly becomes more than a convenient name in an epic. Bozcaada lies just off the Troad, close to the southern entrance of the Dardanelles.

I wrote more about the archaeology behind Troy, and the difficult question of how much of the story can be connected with history, in Was Troy Real? History and Archaeology Before the Odyssey.

Ships continued to stop at Tenedos long after the Trojan stories were written down. The reason was increasingly practical. Strong northerly winds could prevent sailing vessels from continuing through the Dardanelles toward Constantinople, so they waited near the island for conditions to change.

By the sixth century, this mattered enough for Justinian to have grain storage facilities built on Tenedos. Grain arriving from Alexandria could be unloaded there and transferred to smaller vessels for the journey onward.

Centuries later, Pîrî Reis was still writing about shelter and wind around the island. In the Kitâb-ı Bahriye, he describes a harbor where small vessels could take refuge from northerly winds.

Tenedos first enters one of the world's most famous war stories as a place where ships wait. Much later, sailors were still waiting there.

What It Looks Like

Bozcaada is a low island, open to the Aegean wind. Vineyards occupy a large part of its agricultural landscape, and traditional vines sit close to the ground rather than rising in long, high rows.

Its highest point is Göztepe, at 192 metres. From the sea it stands out clearly against the rest of the island.

There is only one town, on the northeastern coast. Its old Turkish and Greek quarters still carry different traces of the communities that lived here. Houses, streets, religious buildings, and the harbor preserve parts of that history.

Then there is the castle.

Bozcaada Castle stands directly above the harbor and is hard to miss when the ferry approaches. We do not know exactly when the first fortress was built on the site. Byzantines, Genoese, Venetians, and Ottomans used it at different times. Mehmed II had it rebuilt after the Ottoman conquest, and it underwent another extensive reconstruction during the reign of Mahmud II.

Where It Is

Bozcaada belongs to Çanakkale Province and lies in the northeastern Aegean, near the southern entrance to the Dardanelles.

It covers about 36 square kilometres. After Gökçeada and Marmara Island, it is Türkiye's third-largest island.

The ferry leaves from Geyikli on the mainland and arrives directly beside the castle. There are no other villages elsewhere on the island.

Outside the town, the change is quick. Streets give way to vineyards, open fields, low hills, and coves.

Tenes, the Double Axe, and the Grapes

Before it was Bozcaada, the island was Tenedos.

Greek mythology connected that name with Tenes, the legendary ruler of the island. Several versions of his story survive, so there is no single neat account to repeat as fact. The common thread is that Tenes is cast into the sea and reaches the island that later bears his name.

The island's coins give us something more tangible.

A double axe is one of the most recognizable symbols on ancient Tenedian coinage. Grapes appear too. The axe is actually the more puzzling of the two.

Ancient writers offered different explanations for it. Aristotle associated it with a Tenedian law concerning adultery. Other traditions connected the axe with Tenes and the story of his arrival on the island.

Apparently, even people much closer to ancient Tenedos than we are could disagree about what its symbol meant.

The grapes require less interpretation. Viticulture became one of the enduring features of island life.

During the Ottoman period, the population included both Turkish Muslims and Greek Orthodox Christians. Historical counts also show how substantial the Greek community once was. The 1893 Ottoman figures record 2,479 Greeks and 1,247 Turks. A Patriarchate count from 1912 gives 5,420 Greeks and 1,200 Turks. In the 1927 Turkish census, there were about 2,500 Greeks and 1,247 Turks.

Those numbers changed dramatically during the twentieth century.

Greek-language education was restricted in 1927. A separate Greek school reopened in the early 1950s and closed again in 1964, during the political crisis between Türkiye and Greece over Cyprus.

The 1965 census still recorded around 600 Greek residents on Bozcaada, out of a total population of 2,141. The community continued to decline after that. By 2000, only 22 ethnic Greeks were recorded as permanent residents.

That is a striking change within a few generations. It also matters when we talk about the island's wine culture, because Greek families had long been deeply involved in its vineyards and wineries.

Grapes Against the Wind

Bozcaada Çavuşu is the grape most closely identified with the island today. Kuntra, also known as Karasakız, Vasilâki, and Karalahna are also strongly associated with local vineyards.

Bozcaada Çavuş Üzümü was registered as a menşe adı, or designation of origin, in 2020.

The official registration contains a detail I find much more interesting than simply saying that Bozcaada has good grapes.

Çavuş has functionally female flowers and needs another grape variety for effective pollination. Traditionally, Kuntra and Vasilâki are planted among the Çavuş vines for that purpose.

A vineyard that looks like rows of grapes from a distance is therefore more complicated when you get closer. Different varieties are growing together because they need one another.

Wind is another part of the local system. Bozcaada is exposed to strong northerly winds, and its traditional vines are trained low in a goblet form.

The usual explanation is that poyraz keeps the grapes dry and helps the vineyards. It is a little more complicated than that. Bozcaada is surrounded by sea, and humidity is also part of the conditions in which Çavuş grows. The wind certainly affects the vineyards, but its effect on the grapes is not as simple as it is sometimes described.

Bozcaada also uses that wind for electricity. A wind power plant opened on the western side of the island in 2000. Its 17 turbines have an installed capacity of 10.2 MW, and electricity beyond the island's needs can be transferred to the national grid.

There are modern wind turbines on Bozcaada now, but you can still see the old windmills on the hill across from the castle. Swim in the sheltered bay between them and the castle, and the view changes depending on which way you turn. Look toward the castle and you could be somewhere in a medieval story. Turn toward the windmills and you might feel like Sancho Panza, watching Don Quixote charge at them with a mixture of confusion and amazement. And you are doing all this in turquoise water. I don't know what more magic one could ask for.

The Words Inside the Name

The origin of Bozcaada is less certain than the name may first appear.

Pîrî Reis provides one possible explanation. He describes a prominent boz hill on the island, identified with today's Göztepe, that sailors could recognize from far out at sea. The TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi connects this description with the historical forms Boz ada and Bozca ada.

In modern Turkish, boz describes a greyish or muted colour. Ada means island.

For a Turkish learner, there is an obvious temptation here. Bozcaada looks as though we could simply identify -ca as the same suffix found in büyükçe, meaning "rather big" or "biggish."

I would not teach the place name that way.

We have evidence connecting the name with the boz hill, but that does not establish that the -ca in the historical place name developed through the same grammatical process as modern -ca/-ce. Place names can preserve old forms that refuse to behave like textbook examples.

Poyraz gives us a clearer linguistic trail.

In Turkish, poyraz is a north or northeast wind. The word ultimately comes through Greek forms related to Boreas, the ancient Greek north wind.

Then there is a completely Turkish word that belongs naturally to Bozcaada: bağcılık.

Bağ means vineyard. With -cı, it becomes bağcı, someone who grows grapes or works in a vineyard. Add -lık, and bağcı becomes bağcılık, viticulture.

This is one of the things I like about teaching Turkish through places. A word such as bağcılık is easier to remember when the thing itself is growing all around you.

Keeping the Stone and the Vine

In 1982, Bozcaada was placed under broad conservation protection. The town was designated an urban conservation area, archaeological protection covered historic monuments and necropolises, and natural conservation status applied to the rest of the island.

The date matters because the protection came before the development pressure created by later tourism.

That has helped preserve much of the physical character of the town. The vineyards present a more complicated problem. A landscape can survive construction pressure and still change because the people who work it leave, land values rise, or another industry becomes more profitable.

Tourism has transformed Bozcaada's economy. Traditional viticulture requires land and labour, while both have become increasingly valuable for other uses.

The geographical indication for Bozcaada Çavuş Üzümü therefore protects more than a familiar name on a label. Its registration connects the grape with cultivation practices and environmental conditions specific to the island.

Bozcaada is only 36 square kilometres. Still, you can read an unusual amount of its history simply by moving through it.

Much of that history is still visible in the castle, the old quarters, and especially in the vineyards beyond the town.

Sources

• TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, "Bozcaada" 

• Homer, Iliad, Book I (Apollo and Tenedos)

• Virgil, Aeneid, Book II

• Procopius, On Buildings (De Aedificiis), Book V 

• Pîrî Reis, Kitâb-ı Bahriye (1521)

• T.C. Bozcaada Kaymakamlığı, "Coğrafi Yapısı" 

• Türk Patent ve Marka Kurumu, Coğrafi İşaretler Portalı, "Bozcaada Çavuş Üzümü", Tescil No. 497 

• Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, Gökçeada (Imbros) and Bozcaada (Tenedos): preserving the bicultural character of the two Turkish islands

• Şahin, E. & Dardeniz, A. (2022), "Tozlayıcı olarak Kuntra (Karasakız) ve Vasilâki üzüm çeşitlerinin kullanıldığı Bozcaada Çavuşu üzüm çeşidinde verim ve kalite özelliklerinin belirlenmesi", Journal of Tekirdağ Agricultural Faculty, 19(4) 

• Okumuş, D., "'Inherited Gentrification': Changing Profiles of Gentrifiers via Inheritance, The Case of Bozcaada", ICONARP International Journal of Architecture and Planning 

• WildWinds.com, Tenedos coin catalog (double axe and grape iconography) 

• BİFED, "About Bozcaada" (Tenes myth) — https://www.bifed.org/en/about-bozcaada/