|
Senior Member Has-Been
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Fethiye, Turkey
Posts: 3,086
Thanks: 322
Thanked 533 Times in 254 Posts
|
Natural Swimming Pool
From ZAMAN:
Turkey’s first natural swimming pool
When first searching for a place to build a house on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast, my wife Jessica dreamed it would be just a short walk from the water, so she could rise before breakfast and plunge into the sea.
That, however, overlapped with my nightmare: overpriced land, noisy yachts, whining jet skis, booming discotheques and the empty-headed ghastliness of dawn-to-dusk package hotel animators.
So we compromised. We would choose a site up in the mountains. With the money that we saved on the price of the plot, we would bring the water to our door with a magnificent swimming pool. Indeed, when the great excavator arrived to dig the foundations of our future house, our first action was to carve out a preliminary basin. Then the stress and complications of regular building overwhelmed us and two summers went by. For swimming at home, we simply lined the hole with greenhouse plastic, pumped in water from the irrigation canal and did our best to ignore the algae.
As the second summer wore on, however, Jessica became impatient. We began to summon contractors. We got quotes and advice from a dozen people, from our local plasterer to a fancy man all in white from Antalya and his ageing damsel, who balanced across our stony acre in stiletto heels. We considered liners, half-walling, fiberglass, bricks, stone, pre-cast plastic, re-inforced concrete and un-re-inforced concrete. It became clear that building a pool is no amateur undertaking.
We remembered one lesson from our Tuscan holiday -- that many people don’t actually like swimming in chlorine. But without chlorine, in the heat of the Lycian summer, we could already see how our swimming hole clogged up with slippery green slime within a week. So, Jessica seized on the idea of copying a movement that has spread in northern Europe in recent decades. She would create a natural pool, an ecosystem in which the water is cleaned by aquatic plants.
Winter evenings on the Internet led her to the founder of the natural pool movement, a company in Austria, but she was not met with encouragement. An Austrian expert favoured her keen questions with a three-page letter outlining what she had to do, adding a warning. “The heat is extreme. Nobody has done this in Turkey before,” the message said. “My advice is not to try.”
The Austrians underestimated Jessica -- we also had a stroke of luck. One day we were looking unhappily at yet another potential builder’s reinforced concrete box-pool, tut-tutting over the outrageous price of the little blue glass tiles everyone lines them with. Some of Jessica’s ambitions unnerved the sub-contractor. He suggested a meeting with Ramazan, the pool equipment maestro in nearby Tekirova.
Jessica returned with her face glowing. She had found her ideal counterpart! It turned out that Ramazan, too, burned the midnight bytes trying to move beyond his diet of monotonous chlorinated pools. He had once done a natural pond, but nothing like this. Together, he and Jessica would build what we now knew would be Turkey’s first natural swimming pool.
Watching their plans develop, I began to feel that aquapark would be a better description. One pool became two, then three small lakes. Between them ran creeks, cascades and waterfalls. The design called for 150 tons of water to join 50 tons of rounded river stones and 20 tons of thick paving on our precarious, landslide-prone mountainside. My heart sank as it became clear that there would soon be three new members of my temperamental family of water pumps, not to mention filters, valves and air-bubble blowers.
I tried to remonstrate that we’d never have the electrical power to make all these things run, but Ramazan wouldn’t listen. He was a passionate, overworked, chain-smoking, secularist, republican dreamer who had loved pools since a childhood spent damming streams in his native Black Sea mountains. His wife Feride never left his side, clearly believing that he might whirl into a parallel universe if left untended.
Reassuringly, however, Ramazan teamed up with Kasim, probably Kemer’s most diligent contractor, and his brother Zeki, with whom I enjoyed discussions of Turkish politics from the brothers’ unusual perspective as “Circassians,” as they were half-Chechen and half-Ossete.
Kasım had even rarer qualities as a builder, being decent to his workers, careful in planning, quietly professional in manner and personally devout.
The design rapidly took shape to the tune of the dirges sung by one of two Zaza workmen from Elazığ. Jessica supervised the rough mechanical excavation. The builders smoothed the earth and on the bottom of the main pool, laid a flat base of lightly re-inforced concrete. Ramazan then tracked down the supplier of a liner that he vowed could resist nuclear war, a tough black rubber membrane usually used to keep water out of the foundations of industrial mega-projects. We sandwiched it between two layers of white polyester felt and then started building the walls. Against steep surfaces, the rounded river stones were invisibly secured from behind with cement. Elsewhere, they were just laid on top of each other.
The access road collapsed. The water pump played up. The July heat wave was crippling. Our electrical supplies dipped below 120 volts, forcing Ramazan to rip out and replace pumps, fuseboards and through-flow theories on nearly every visit. He was building half a dozen other pools at the same time and juggled with emergencies in what seemed to be half the hotels in our part of the Turkish Riviera. He kept making mistakes -- air pipes that couldn’t work because they pointed downhill underwater, two pool lights entirely forgotten and a miscalculation that left a shelf around the main pool 20 centimeters deep instead of 40. Even though I knew that building a pool is a huge, one-shot gamble, his boyish enthusiasm made it hard get angry with him.
The uppermost of the three pools was to be like a swamp. It would filter out debris and algae through a ton of quartz sand and another ton of gravel, on which Jessica planted baby papyrus, bulrushes and grasses collected from springs and marshes on our mountainside. This top pool would overflow into a seven-meter-long creek, lined with zeolite. This white, chalk-like mineral would be a natural filter, full of microscopic holes to harbor the bacterial forces of good in the war on algae. Then the water would arrive in a second, deeper pool with oxygenating surface plants, including water lilies, pondweed and floating stars brought from Holland. The water would thus be clean and fresh by the time it arrived in the third basin, our swimming pool.
That was the theory, anyway. The evening after the workers left with tips, celebration and an immaculate tidying up, we began to fill the main pool completely for the first time. The southeast corner of the pool collapsed. We hauled the rocks off the wall to discover water pouring out through a crevasse in the liner created by the pool-light cables, installed too late and too short by Ramazan. It soaked an area of uncompressed backfill, cracked the wall and sank everything 30 centimeters. But the liner did not rip. Kasım and Zeki returned for another “last day” and then left.
Ramazan was still juggling with pumping power as well. If too little water ran through the eco-system, there was no chance for the plants to clean the main pool’s water. But the first pump he supplied produced such a geyser of water that it overwhelmed the top pool, spilling over another bank of uncompressed earth. As the water levels of the three pools waxed and waned like tides, we gradually found more spillage points, leaks and difficulties. The contractors came for a second “last day,” then a third.
Then a miracle happened. Ten days after the aquatic plants in the top pool took hold, the water turned crystal clear. And just as the second pool seemed about to be overwhelmed by algae, a vigorous filtration through the top pool plants cleared it without chemicals. Shortly afterwards, the water lilies flowered.
We can’t yet keep the main pool clear of algae with the natural system, but it seems only a question of time before our plants are big enough to do the job. For now, we make do with hydrogen peroxide and slightly paler hair. Our four-year-old daughter Scarlett jumped in the first day it was full and within a week was swimming alone. Just as we had hoped, the river stones give the pool a natural jade color that blends perfectly with the mountainside.
The sky could, of course, still fall on our heads. The gardener is stacking great dry stone retaining walls against the downward slopes, tending to my paranoia that winter rains will wash all our works down into the sea. But when I look looking at the gurgling cascade of pools from our terrace, I am at last beginning to get used to the idea, as one guest put it, that I may be able to jettison the English conception of life as one long struggle against an inevitable “grand failure.”
Still, building our house and pool has been an uphill battle. One neighbor, who faced many of the same challenges, appears to have given in, abandoning the illegal, half-built carcass of his outsized villa. And despite these practical difficulties, many of the delights we derive from ours -- and the problems -- were predictably inherent in the location and conception of the project. To conclude this series of articles next week, I will try to give an overview of what my three-year adventure taught me about the ingredients of a successful second home.
16.08.2007
Features
HUGH POPE
|
Linear Mode
