A few days ago when heading up to go skiing at Saklıkent, Seb decided to take the road via Sinan Değirmeni. Down at the creek we turned left instead of right, and I mentioned I had never been on that road before. “Wow,” he asked surprised, “you’ve never seen the ambar at Sinan Değirmeni?” Indeed, my one time in that area before, I had turned right and headed toward Güzle not knowing that there were a bunch of old wooden grain storage buildings (ambar) just a couple hundred meters above the road junction.
According to this page, these grain (namely, wheat and barley) storage buildings (86 of them apparently) were built about 250-300 years ago (in what they call the late Ottoman period). They’re made from cedar trees without the use of any nails. Since 2013 the area has been under some sort of historic and cultural protection.
The name Sinan Değirmeni means Sinan’s mill. Indeed the mill was in this building:
Unfortunately you can’t see inside, but from the side you can look into the crawlspace under the floor and see the bottom of the grindstone.
Here you see that Sinan Değirmeni is not so far from our potential skiing:
We continued our drive up to Saklıkent and had a fun four hours of ski touring. Seb had been hoping to use the lifts, and although the upper lift was running, they weren’t allowing skiers because there wasn’t enough snow. Luckily we had brought our skins so we were able to make our way up under our own power. That was my preference anyway. It ended up being fun skiing with better conditions than I expected.
I used my newly purchased (used) AT boots for the first time and am very happy to say that my feet felt perfectly normal (no blisters, no bruising) the next day. 🙂 I guess it’s time to start the ski season!
Looks like fun all around!