Alaçat? herb festival boosts Aegean hopes before 'black summer'

Very few people who have seen the busy streets of Alaçat?, the popular tourist resort in the Aegean province of ?zmir, can imagine what the small town looked like some 20 years ago - a sleepy village with a small butcher and a weekly green market in the main square. An oft-heard complaint from the mouth of ?zmir locals is that they should have bought land or a house when it was still dirt cheap.

Today's Alaçat? is a strange mix of the glamorous tourists who come for the weekend and the bourgeois-boheme "bo-bo"s  who  have invested in the newly built/renovated stone houses to live there for all or part of the year. Add to this the stubborn locals who continue to live there, working in the traditional shops among the posh designer boutiques, seeking employment in the tourism sector or simply enjoying the great rent they receive for their property.

On the first day of the traditional Alaçat? Herb Festival, scheduled for April 7-10, all three groups have flocked on the streets of the town, giving a much-needed boost to the Aegean tourism sector which fears a "black summer" due to refugee issues and the fall out with Russia. "A four-day breathing space for an industry which is gasping for breath," remarked most of the observers.

This year's Alaçat? Herb Festival, the seventh of its kind, is more of a diverse affair, influencing areas ranging from gastronomy to wearable textile art to biodiversity. Each year the festival chooses an "herb" to be introduced to the gourmets, food/lifestyle bloggers and, this year, biodiversity academics who are among the guests. This year's is radika, or Taraxacum officinale, commonly and inaccurately known as chicory to English speakers. Chicory is radika's somewhat acrid little sister, but not the same thing. ...