Bezirgan today has no ancient, grand or great buildings, it's a working farm village, with no-nonsense farmhouses, homes to farming people.

The traditional farmhouses in the village are built of stone, held together with a mud/straw mortar, and roofed with soil. Those which have seen some restoration work in the past have had the soil roofs replaced with tiles, generally using the buildings' original timbers, which for the most part were cedar.

Most have room for the beasts on the ground floor, together with storage for hay and for tools, with the people living upstairs on the first floor, which is warm in winter, and out of the dust in summer. Generally, the upper floor has a timber balcony running its entire length, on which people practically live in summer.

Sadly, a great many of these houses are in a dire state of disrepair, some completely past redemption; and several collapse or are demolished in every year which passes.

At the moment, they are protected by no conservation orders - which is a great pity, they ought to be, because they are good buildings - being of stone construction, they keep out the heat during the summer, and keep it in during the winter.

In their place, nondescript concrete boxes are appearing, whose lifespan will probably be no more than 20 years; years characterized for their inhabitants by their lack of protection from the stifling heat of the area in summer, and the dank penetrating dampness of the winters. However, at least most of these have one redeeming feature - for the most part they comprise only a single or at most two storeys, so although they add nothing to the village, they don't intrude too badly into the village-scape.

Far more deplorable though, are the few (thankfully) newly constructed and truly horrible buildings which have been erected in the name of speculation, without thought or consideration given to using design and materials appropriate to the village. As yet, none is occupied. We would like to believe that this is because nobody can be found who wouldn't die of embarrassment at being associated with them, but this is probably a fond hope. What has probably saved Bezirgan thus far from the destructive menace of speculative building so rife on the coast has been the lack of town water.

Nor is there any running water in any shape or form - no springs, no rivers, streams or lakes. The only water came from wells, either communal or dug privately on individual owners' lands. These of course are expensive to sink, and by no means certain to give a guaranteed water supply. They require a lot of maintenance, and in dry years (such as this one) many of them dry up in the middle of summer.

The other factor saving the village is that the Turkish government has had the wisdom to forbid the sale of land in villages and rural areas to foreigners. So forbidden their prey, the speculators have nothing here on which to feed. It is greatly to be hoped that this state of affairs continues - certainly at present, there looks to be no likelihood of rural land being thrown to the packs of predators. The wholesale destruction of the environment, community, culture and lifestyle by relentless building and the influx of disproportionate numbers of incomers, such as can be seen with horrible clarity not so far away, is, for the moment, kept at bay..

Ideally, people will realise that the old farmhouses are worth keeping, that money invested in their restoration is a far sounder proposition than building new concrete boxes. The same cost not only would give a much pleasanter home, cool in summer and warm in winter, but one which, having existed for a hundred and fifty years, is likely to be good for another hundred and fifty!