A Turkish Summer: From Yayla to Yazlık, Sahil to Akşam Serinliği

For readers in a hurry: Summer in Türkiye has developed around different ways of leaving the heat behind. For centuries, pastoral communities moved their animals to the cooler yayla. Ottoman Istanbul had its sayfiye districts and summer residences. Later came the yazlık, the family summer house, followed by the growth of Aegean and Mediterranean holiday towns and large coastal resorts. Alongside these larger changes are the small habits of an ordinary summer evening: going down to the sahil, opening a bag of çekirdek, and waiting for the akşam serinliği before going outside.

By early summer, movement toward the coast becomes visible across Türkiye.

Families reopen yazlık houses that have been closed through the winter. Roads toward the Aegean and Mediterranean get busier, hotel prices rise with the season, and towns that were quiet a few months earlier fill with yazlıkçılar, domestic holidaymakers, and foreign tourists. By late afternoon, another rhythm takes over.

People begin moving toward the sahil, and many wait for the akşam serinliği before going out.

This seasonal movement has much older versions. Long before the modern summer house or the five-star resort, pastoral communities moved toward higher ground with their animals. Ottoman Istanbul had its own summer geography, with sayfiye areas, waterfront residences, and imperial summer palaces. The places have changed, and so have the reasons for going. The language has kept traces of each period.

Yayla

Yayla belongs to an old pair of words for summer and winter grazing grounds rather than a single modern word. Yaylak was summer pasture; kışlak was winter ground.

For the communities that used these words, summer and winter could mean living in different places. Yaylak and kışlak belonged to that seasonal movement.

This vocabulary comes from a real system of seasonal herding. Families moved with their animals between lower winter pastures and cooler highland pastures in summer.

Historians call this transhumance. In the Taurus Mountains, Yörük communities followed this seasonal pattern for centuries, moving with their animals between winter grounds near the coast and summer pastures higher in the mountains, a pattern recorded in Ottoman-era tax registers and local administrative records. There was a practical reason for moving: coastal pasture is green in winter and burned dry by summer, while highland pasture is snowbound in winter and lush by summer. Moving between the two kept livestock fed year-round in a way that staying in either place could not. The same logic shaped yaylacılık in the Eastern Black Sea mountains, where families historically spent the summer months at altitude producing butter and cheese from herds grazing the high pastures and returned to the coast for winter.

Traditional yaylacılık involved demanding seasonal work: driving animals over difficult terrain, milking and processing dairy by hand, building seasonal shelters, and keeping watch over the flock through the night. Turkish still says yaylaya çıkmak, literally to ascend or go up to the yayla, rather than a plain verb for "to go," a phrasing that keeps the original physical fact of altitude embedded in ordinary speech.

As more families settled permanently and small-scale herding became harder to sustain during the twentieth century, the meaning of yayla began to change. For many families, it gradually became a summer place to return to for cooler weather and family connections rather than a working pasture. In parts of the Eastern Black Sea and the Taurus range, working yaylacılık still exists, tied to real dairy production and real herds. In other regions, "yaylaya çıkmak" now more often means a weekend at a family property that keeps the name and the view without keeping the animals. Both practices exist right now, in different parts of the country, side by side.

Yazlık: Leaving the City for the Summer

The movement toward cooler places did not belong only to pastoral life. Ottoman Istanbul developed its own summer geography. Wealthy families spent part of the warmer months away from the dense center of the city, especially along the Bosphorus and in places that became known as sayfiye areas. The word sayfiye refers to a place used for summer residence or recreation, and the houses associated with it ranged from waterfront yalı residences and köşks to summer palaces.

The imperial family followed the same seasonal logic on a very different scale.

Beylerbeyi Palace, built for Sultan Abdülaziz between 1863 and 1865 on the Asian shore of the Bosphorus, was used as a summer palace and as a place to receive foreign state guests. The palace belongs to a larger history of Ottoman summer residences along the Bosphorus, where access to water, gardens, and air made the shoreline attractive during the hotter months.

The modern Turkish yazlık belongs to a later and much broader version of this habit.

Yazlık can mean anything intended for summer use, but yazlık ev or simply yazlık usually means a second home used during the summer. Research on second homes in Türkiye traces the early urban tradition to the late Ottoman period, while ownership spread much further among the urban middle classes during the second half of the twentieth century. Coastal development around the Marmara, Aegean, and Mediterranean turned the yazlık into a familiar part of middle-class summer life.

For many families, this created a very different summer from a hotel holiday. People might move to the yazlık for several weeks or months, sometimes for much of the school break. The house had its own routines, neighbors returned each year, and children often grew up seeing the same summer friends from June to August. Yazlığa gitmek, to go to the summer house, therefore describes a temporary move as much as a holiday.

That culture still exists, although the geography around it has changed. Some former summer towns have become expensive year-round residential areas. Others remain strongly seasonal, filling rapidly once schools close and becoming quiet again in autumn. The word yazlıkçı grew out of this pattern. It refers to someone who comes to a place for the summer, especially someone who owns or regularly uses a summer home there. Depending on who says it, yazlıkçılar geldi can be a neutral observation or a local comment on the moment when the population suddenly grows.

Sahil

Sahil, the Turkish word for coast or shore, is a loanword, not a native Turkic term.

Sahil entered Turkish from the Arabic sāḥil (ساحل). The first attested Turkish use, according to Kubbealtı Lugatı, appears in Aşık Paşa's Garib-name, a Turkish-language didactic poem from 1330.

The word entered Anatolian Turkish through Ottoman Turkish's heavy borrowing from Arabic, and it has stayed in everyday use since, unlike a number of Ottoman-era Arabic and Persian loanwords that were pushed out during the twentieth-century language reform.

Modern Turkish keeps sahil distinct from several near-synonyms in ways worth noting for a learner, though sahil's core dictionary meaning is still the plain, literal one: the strip of land along a sea, lake, or river. Kıyı, a native Turkic word, is the more neutral, general term for a shoreline, usable in the same plain sense. Plaj, borrowed from French plage, refers specifically to a beach, a stretch of sand or pebble meant for swimming and sunbathing. Deniz is simply the sea itself. In everyday city life, sahil can also mean the waterfront people actually go to, a developed, walkable strip rather than an undeveloped shoreline. A resident of a coastal Turkish city will often say sahile gidiyoruz, we're going to the sahil, to describe walking or driving to a specific promenade, even if their apartment already overlooks the same body of water. In that kind of sentence, sahil is functioning less as "the coast" in the abstract and more as a named destination, a stretch with benches, tea gardens, and other people in it, distinct from simply living near the sea. The same logic explains why sahile inmek, literally to descend to the sahil, is common in a hillside city like İstanbul, where many neighborhoods sit well above the water and going to the coast is, in a literal geographic sense, going down.

The public waterfronts this vocabulary describes are, in cities such as İzmir and İstanbul, public spaces in the literal sense rather than resort amenities. İzmir's Kordon and the sahil roads of İstanbul's Kadıköy and Moda district are public waterfront walking areas, free to use, open at all hours, and central to how residents structure an evening. A learner encountering "sahil" in a sentence should not automatically picture sand and sunbathing. More often it means a paved or landscaped public walkway used for exercise, conversation, and, in summer particularly, the evening cooldown described below.

From Yazlık to Five-Star Hotel

There is another Turkish summer that developed much more recently: the organized beach holiday. From the second half of the twentieth century onward, the Aegean and Mediterranean coasts became major destinations for Turkish holidaymakers as well as international tourism. Bodrum, Çeşme, Marmaris and Antalya came to represent different versions of the coastal holiday, from family summer houses and small pensions to large resort complexes.

Antalya became especially important in the growth of large-scale hotel tourism. From the late twentieth century onward, four- and five-star hotels and holiday villages expanded across the region. The her şey dahil, all-inclusive, system became particularly widespread around Antalya. By the mid-2000s, Turkish tourism researchers were already studying its effects across more than a hundred accommodation businesses in the region.

This created two summer worlds along some of the same coastline. International visitors may spend a week inside a large resort where accommodation, food, pools, beach access, and entertainment form one package. Turkish families also travel south and west for hotel holidays, while others stay in a family yazlık, rent an apartment, choose a small pansiyon, or return to the same coastal town every summer.

And summer changes the economics of those towns. July and August bring intense demand to many Aegean and Mediterranean destinations. Accommodation prices rise with the season, particularly in places such as Bodrum, Çeşme and Alaçatı. For example, booking-platform data reported by Anadolu Agency for summer 2025 showed July and August as Bodrum's busiest booking period and substantial differences between ordinary coastal accommodation and five-star hotels. Those figures belong to one booking platform rather than the entire Turkish market, so they are better read as an example of the seasonal pattern than as national averages.

For locals, tourism can therefore mean something quite different from a week by the sea. A town that feels ordinary in May may have crowded roads, fuller beaches, and much higher accommodation demand in August. The Turkish distinction between yerli turist, domestic tourist, and yabancı turist, foreign tourist, matters here. The Aegean and Mediterranean summer economy depends on both, and the two often occupy the same towns in very different ways.

Çekirdek

Çekirdek is an ordinary word with an unusually contested history for something so common. In its broadest sense it means seed, pit, or stone and by extension, core or nucleus: çekirdek aile, for instance, means nuclear family. The specific summer object, the roasted sunflower seed, is technically ay çekirdeği, sunflower seed, shortened in everyday speech to the generic çekirdek.

Linguists have proposed several origins for çekirdek. Andreas Tietze connected it with a root based on the sound of cracking or crunching. Another proposed origin traces it to the Old Turkic çekirtük, meaning pistachio or hazelnut. A recent article in TDK's Belleten suggests a third possibility, connecting it with çiğit, an old word for cottonseed recorded in the eleventh-century Dîvânu Lugâti't-Türk. One recent proposal, in other words, connects modern çekirdek to a seed vocabulary that existed centuries before anyone in Anatolia was eating sunflower seeds, attached originally to an entirely different plant. No single account is universally accepted, and a confident single-line etymology anywhere online is worth treating with some skepticism. What is not in dispute is that the word has meant some kind of small hard seed or pit for a very long time, and that its narrowing toward specifically "sunflower seed" in casual speech is a matter of usage rather than of etymology.

The plant itself arrived in Turkish agriculture considerably later than the word's own history suggests. Sunflower is native to the Americas, and according to the Trakya Agricultural Research Institute, part of Türkiye's Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, large-scale sunflower production in Türkiye was started by Turkish immigrants from Bulgaria in the 1950s and remained limited in scale in those early years before expanding through later breeding programs, particularly in the Trakya region. The institute dates the beginning of large-scale production to the 1950s. This does not establish when sunflowers first appeared in Anatolia. The same institute's material on sunflower cultural practices confirms that Türkiye grows both oilseed sunflower, pressed mainly for cooking oil, and sunflowers grown specifically for eating as seeds, the larger-seeded type, which is what fills a bag of çekirdek. The institute reports that Trakya has remained the main production area for decades, even as exact figures shift year to year.

The specific act of eating them, cracking a shell between the front teeth to extract the kernel, has its own verb: çitlemek. Turkish speakers use this constantly and specifically; there is no single-word English equivalent, and translators typically resort to a full phrase, "to crack sunflower seeds with your teeth." Its own etymology remains unresolved. Eating çekirdek also has its own rhythm. A bag of çekirdek does not disappear in a handful of bites the way most snack foods do. Each seed requires a small, repetitive, largely unconscious motion, which means the food occupies the hands and part of the attention for an extended stretch of time without ever becoming the center of it. This makes çekirdek a natural accompaniment to activities that are themselves extended and low-intensity: watching a football match, sitting on a park bench, a long evening of conversation on a balcony, a family visit that runs past its planned end.

Akşam Serinliği

Akşam serinliği, evening coolness, is a very ordinary Turkish expression. It refers to the cooler part of the evening after a hot summer day. How noticeable it is depends on where you are in Türkiye. In Southeastern Anatolia, the difference between afternoon and evening can be considerable. Along the Aegean coast, evening breezes often make the drop in temperature more noticeable. The Mediterranean coast tends to stay warmer and more humid into the night, so the relief may come later. The Black Sea follows another pattern, with humid summers and more frequent cloud cover.

The language around this part of the day is just as ordinary. Hava serinledi means “the weather has cooled down,” and people say it when they notice that it is finally comfortable enough to sit outside or go for a walk. Serinlemek means “to cool down.”

Someone might sit in the shade to serinlemek, or drink a cold ayran for the same reason.

You also hear Biraz serinlesin, “let it cool down a little.” It can mean waiting before going out because the afternoon is still too hot. Akşamüstü, roughly “late afternoon” or “toward evening,” is another useful word here. In summer, this is often when people begin making plans for the evening: going down to the sahil, visiting someone, or eating later than they might in winter.

These are simple expressions, but they come up often because weather affects the timing of everyday life. In summer, Biraz serinlesin, çıkarız, “Let it cool down a little, then we’ll go out,” can be an entire plan.

Four Words, Four Different Histories

Yayla, sahil, çekirdek, and akşam serinliği come from four different places. Yayla comes from a way of life based on seasonal herding, rooted in old herding vocabulary, still tied to real dairy production in some regions today. Sahil is an Arabic loanword, absorbed into Turkish through Ottoman-era borrowing, that took on a more specific social meaning in modern urban life than its dictionary definition alone suggests.

Çekirdek is a word whose own etymology is still argued over by specialists, attached to a plant whose large-scale cultivation in Türkiye only dates to the 1950s. Akşam serinliği is not a word for a thing at all, but a way of describing a familiar summer pattern, a shift in temperature and behavior that repeats every evening without ever being written down anywhere as a rule.

This is where cultural context changes the experience of reading Turkish. Sahile gidiyoruz is easy to translate as "we're going to the waterfront," and yaylaya çıkıyoruz as "we're going up to the highlands." Both translations are correct. Knowing the cultural context gives the Turkish expressions another layer of meaning.

Vocabulary

• yayla – highland summer pasture

• yaylak – older/parallel term for summer pasture, cognate with yayla

• kışlak – winter pasture, the seasonal counterpart to yaylak

• yaylaya çıkmak – to go up to the yayla (uses çıkmak, "to ascend/go up," in place of a plain verb for "to go")

• sahil – coast, shoreline, specifically a developed or social waterfront

• sahile inmek – to go down to the sahil (used especially in hillside cities)

• kıyı – shoreline in the general, neutral geographic sense

• ay çekirdeği / çekirdek – sunflower seed, generally shortened to çekirdek

• çitlemek – to crack a seed open with the front teeth

• akşam serinliği – the evening cool; also hava serinledi (the weather has cooled), serinlemek (to cool off), biraz serinlesin (let it cool a little), and akşamüstü (toward evening)

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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Q: What does yayla mean in Turkish?

A: Yayla is a highland summer pasture. Historically, communities practicing seasonal herding moved their animals between yaylak, summer pasture, and kışlak, winter ground. In some parts of Türkiye this is still connected to livestock and dairy production. Elsewhere, going to the yayla has become a summer family tradition or a way to escape the heat.

Q: What is a yazlık in Türkiye?

A: Yazlık usually means a house used during the summer, often a second home near the coast. The modern yazlık became especially common among urban middle-class families during the second half of the twentieth century. Some families move to their yazlık for several weeks or much of the school summer break.

Q: What does yazlıkçı mean?

A: A yazlıkçı is someone who comes to a place for the summer, especially someone who owns or regularly stays in a summer home there. In seasonal towns, yazlıkçılar geldi, “the summer residents have arrived,” can describe the period when the population begins to increase.

Q: Did Ottoman Istanbul have a summer-house culture?

A: Yes. Istanbul had established sayfiye areas where wealthy families spent part of the summer away from the dense city center. The Bosphorus became particularly important for summer residences, including waterfront houses, köşks, and imperial residences. Beylerbeyi Palace, completed during the reign of Sultan Abdülaziz in the 1860s, was used as an imperial summer palace.

Q: What is the difference between sahil, kıyı, and plaj?

A: Sahil and kıyı can both refer to the coast or shoreline, while plaj specifically means a beach used for swimming and sunbathing. In everyday urban Turkish, sahil can also refer to the developed public waterfront where people walk, sit, meet friends, or spend the evening.

Q: Why do Turkish people say sahile inmek?

A: Sahile inmek literally means “to go down to the waterfront.” The expression is especially natural in places such as Istanbul, where many neighborhoods sit above sea level and reaching the waterfront involves physically going downhill.

Q: What does çekirdek mean in Turkish?

A: Çekirdek can mean a seed, pit, core, or nucleus. In everyday conversation, it also commonly means roasted sunflower seeds, short for ay çekirdeği. The origin of the word itself is disputed, with several different etymologies proposed by linguists.

Q: What does çekirdek çitlemek mean?

A: Çekirdek çitlemek means cracking sunflower seeds with the teeth and eating the kernels. Çitlemek is the Turkish verb used for this particular action. Sunflower seeds are commonly eaten during long conversations, while watching television or football, and while sitting outdoors.

Q: What does akşam serinliği mean?

A: Akşam serinliği means “the evening cool,” the cooler period that follows a hot summer afternoon. Related expressions include hava serinledi, “the weather has cooled down,” and biraz serinlesin, “let it cool down a little.” These expressions often appear when people are deciding when to go outside during hot weather.

Q: What is her şey dahil?

A: Her şey dahil literally means “everything included” and is the Turkish term for an all-inclusive hotel package. The model became especially widespread in large resort hotels along the Mediterranean coast, particularly around Antalya.

Sources

• Clauson, Gerard, An Etymological Dictionary of Pre-Thirteenth-Century Turkish (1972), historical Turkic pasture terminology, entry kışla:ğ. Referenced via Wiktionary: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/k%C4%B1%C5%9Fla https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/k%C4%B1%C5%9Flak

• Redhouse, James W., A Turkish and English Lexicon (1890), historical entries for yayla/yaylak and related vocabulary. Referenced via Wiktionary's citation apparatus: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yaylak

• Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, "Sustaining Mediterranean Highlands through Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Transhumance Practices" (2025), for Yörük seasonal movement and the yayla-kışlak system. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sustainable-food-systems/articles/10.3389/fsufs.2025.1657538/full

• Daily Sabah, "When Summer Comes, Türkiye's Black Sea Highlands Come Alive," used only for contemporary examples of Black Sea yaylacılık and dairy production. https://www.dailysabah.com

• Republic of Türkiye, Presidency of National Palaces, Beylerbeyi Palace: confirms Beylerbeyi as a summer palace ("yazlık saray") built for Sultan Abdülaziz between 1863 and 1865, used mainly to host foreign state guests. https://www.millisaraylar.gov.tr/Lokasyon/4/Beylerbeyi-Sarayi

• Ankara University, TÜCAUM research on second homes in Türkiye, used for the development of the sayfiye/yazlık tradition and the later spread of second-home ownership among urban households. https://tucaum.ankara.edu.tr/wp-content/uploads/sites/280/2016/12/Int_semp_BC35.pdf

• Kubbealtı Lugatı, entry for sahil: Arabic origin, first attested use in Aşık Paşa's Garib-name (1330). https://lugatim.com/s/sahil

• TDK Belleten (Türk Dili Araştırmaları Yıllığı), "Dîvânu Lugâti't Türk'te Bir Hapaks Örneği Şekirtük İfadesi Üzerine Etimoloji Denemesi" (2024): scholarly dispute over çekirdek's etymology, including the proposed connection with çiğit. https://tdkbelleten.gov.tr/tam-metin/1108/tur

• Republic of Türkiye Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, Trakya Agricultural Research Institute, "Sunflower Breeding, Seed Industry and the Future Directions in Turkey": sunflower production started by Turkish immigrants from Bulgaria in the 1950s, limited in scale in its early years. https://arastirma.tarimorman.gov.tr/ttae/Sayfalar/EN/Detay.aspx?SayfaId=141

• Republic of Türkiye Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, Trakya Agricultural Research Institute, "Sunflower Cultural Practices in Turkey": confirms both oilseed and edible-seed sunflower are grown in Türkiye, and Trakya's role in production. https://arastirma.tarimorman.gov.tr/ttae/Sayfalar/EN/Detay.aspx?SayfaId=142

• Antalya Bilim University institutional repository, tourism research on the development and effects of the her şey dahil (all-inclusive) system in Antalya accommodation businesses. https://acikerisim.antalya.edu.tr/xmlui/handle/20.500.12566/1211

• Anadolu Agency (Anadolu Ajansı), "Sorgulamax, 2025 yaz sezonu konaklama verilerini paylaştı" (30 October 2025): booking-platform data on Bodrum, Antalya, and İzmir summer accommodation for 2025, cited specifically as an example of seasonal demand and price differences in Bodrum, not as a national average. https://www.aa.com.tr/tr/isdunyasi/e-ticaret/sorgulamax-2025-yaz-sezonu-konaklama-verilerini-paylasti/698406

The çitlemek etymology could not be reliably confirmed and is left unresolved in the text rather than filled with an unsourced claim. The çiğit connection to çekirdek is presented as one proposal among several rather than a settled derivation. The Trakya Agricultural Research Institute source describes the start of large-scale commercial sunflower production in Türkiye; it does not address whether the plant was present on Ottoman or Anatolian soil earlier in some smaller or ornamental capacity, and the text does not conflate the two claims. The Anadolu Agency figures come from a single booking platform (Sorgulamax) and are presented in the text as an illustrative example rather than a national statistic, consistent with the source itself.