When I first saw this house in the village of Reşadiye, in October 2001, it was a heartbreaking sight. What had clearly been a very large and grand Ottoman mansion (konak) was now falling apart and seemed destined to decay beyond the point of no return. There were holes in the roof, the walls were subsiding and the ground floor was a cowshed.

There had until recently been an old lady living in the building, occupying the painted başoda, or salon, on the first floor. Though dilapidated, unfurnished and apparently on the verge of collapse, this was still recognisably a very beautiful room. The murals were streaked with rainwater stains and cemented over in places. Most of the window glass was broken and the window frames were rotten. The plastered, carved and painted ceiling was sagging and seemed about to cave in. Much of the building was in too dangerous a condition to explore. From what survived, however, I could still see what the konak had looked like in its former glory 100 or 150 years earlier.

Known locally as the Goca Ev (Big House), the mansion dates from the last decade of the 18th century and enjoyed its heyday under Mehmed Halil Ağa, thought to have been born around 1785 and to have died in 1868. It is the largest and most ambitious of several houses across the Datça peninsula built by the Tuhfezade family, the local magnates. Until the death of Mehmed Halil it was almost certainly the harem, the private family quarters of the ağa and his wife or wives. Mehmed Halil probably received guests in a nearby selâmlık, of which nothing now survives.