Barbaros Köyü (Oyuk Köyü)

Barbaros is a rural settlement in the Urla district, which had village status until 2014 and is now administered as a neighbourhood. It lies west of central Urla, among the hills that stretch towards the Çeşme peninsula. With its stone houses, vegetable plots and colourful scarecrows set up in its streets, it has become one of the most talked-about villages around İzmir in the past decade. Its inclusion in the UN Tourism Best Tourism Villages list in 2025 carried its name beyond Türkiye. Wikipedia traces the village's past through a few administrative records. Its old name was Sıradam, but it appears as Barbaros in an Ottoman Turkish village list dated 1928, when it was a village in the Barbaros sub-district of the Çeşme district. The centre of the sub-district was not Barbaros but Uzunkuyu, and the 1940 census recorded the village population as 507. By the 1955 census the sub-district had been attached to Urla, and the village population was recorded as 504. The neighbourhood head, Barbaros Ersan, told the DHA news agency that the settlement is about 700 years old. Barbaros is no stranger to tourism. According to the neighbourhood head, from the late 1970s a tourism company organised Turkish nights in the village and brought foreign tourists for the first time. Once a week a folk dance group from Dokuz Eylül University performed, and village women set up stalls by the road to sell their handicrafts. He says this went on until 1998 and came to an end as all-inclusive packages spread in the hotels. What brought the village back to life was the Oyuk Festival, first held in 2016. Oyuk is the local word for the scarecrows set up in vegetable gardens, and in the neighbourhood head's words the festival was meant to revive farming, promote the village, bring income to villagers and reverse migration away from it. In the first year workshops were set up with the villagers and about 400 scarecrows were made; he recalls that the village population was 416 at the time, so there was a scarecrow for almost every resident. Some 6 thousand people are said to have attended the first festival. Everyone put a scarecrow in front of their house, window or street, and these figures have become the symbol of the village. The festival is organised through imece, the shared voluntary labour of the villagers, and because the scarecrows wear out in the weather they are renewed every year. So whatever the season you visit, you will find scarecrows in the streets dressed in different clothes and with different faces. Sources give different seasons for the festival: Wikipedia points to the end of summer, while a GoTürkiye promotional article points to spring. Before you go, check that year's festival date in announcements from institutions in Urla. UN Tourism, the United Nations tourism organisation, announced its 2025 Best Tourism Villages at a ceremony held in Huzhou, China. According to GoTürkiye four new villages from Türkiye entered the list: Anıtlı in Mardin, Akyaka in Muğla, Kale Üçağız in Antalya and Barbaros in İzmir. The neighbourhood head says the village's applications in 2021 and 2022 were unsuccessful, that its 2024 application earned it a place in the selection, and that it was registered as a tourism village on 17 October 2025. When you walk around the village, the first things to look at are the scarecrows in the streets and the facades of the stone houses. There are handicraft workshops in the neighbourhood, most of them run by women; a workshop owner who spoke to DHA said that activities such as an open-air cinema, a women's choir and a rhythm workshop are also organised through shared labour. GoTürkiye writes that the village is known for its local produce and handicrafts, that some houses have the words Çat Kapı on their doors, and that home-cooked dishes made with local olive oil, vegetables and herbs can be tasted in these houses. The area around the monument in the village square makes a good starting point for a walk. For those who dislike crowds, the best times are spring and autumn days outside the festival. According to the workshop owner the village receives most visitors in these two seasons, while during the festival the streets become very crowded. This is a place where people live; do not enter courtyards or vegetable plots without permission, and respect the privacy of residents when taking photographs. Barbaros is a short drive from central Urla, and GoTürkiye describes the village as close to Urla. Those coming from central İzmir by public transport can first take ESHOT buses to Urla and then change to the local lines that serve the village; check the current routes on the ESHOT website. Combining Barbaros with Urla İskele and the ancient city of Klazomenai is a good way to see both the history and the village life of the peninsula in a single day.