Many years ago when Müjde was a university student in Izmir she discovered this little village in the hills of Selçuk which no outsider had ever heard about before. She fell in love with it, and with the first sizeable bit of money she earned at the age of 23 she bought a donkey shed there. It was a ruined donkey shed. It took seven years of hard labor and untold amounts of money to fix it. It is now our house. You can see it half-hidden by trees at the top of the opposite side of the village.

Sevan was a glamorous travel writer with accumulated adventures over five continents when Müjde and Sevan met in 1992. They instantly fell in love, married and proceeded to produce three offspring. They knew they did not want to go on living in the Big City for ever - or even for a little while, in fact. In 1995 - the donkey shed having become more or less livable by then - they moved to Şirince for good.

Şirince was at that time a beautiful place. All the villagers dreamed of demolishing their rotten old houses and building nice and clean breeze-block shanty houses in their place. Müjde and Sevan were dismayed by this. They argued with the villagers, saying it should be possible, and not too difficult or expensive either, to rebuild old houses in the traditional way. The villagers smiled in their age-old wisdom, and secretly thought that city people were dumb. M & S had no choice but to buy some more donkey sheds and rebuild them to prove their point. The Kerevetli House was done in 1998, the Cumbalı and Hamamlı in '99 - though to most people they looked a good 100 years older. City folks raved about them. They started buying up donkey sheds in Şirince so that the Nişanyans would fix it for them. The villagers kept smiling.

Müjde and Sevan had meanwhile become famous as the authors of a wildly acclaimed guidebook about the small and unusual hotels of Turkey. At first they did not know what to do with their collection of refurbished donkey sheds. Then they concluded that, as the most-dreaded hotel critics in the land, they might as well put their hand under the millstone - as they say in Turkish - and learn how to run an inn themselves. Nişanyan Houses were born in August 1999.

On top of the hill behind Nişanyan Houses used to stand the Abomination of Şirince. This was an ugly apartment building that some bigshots from Ankara had started building years ago and left unfinished when they ran out of funds. Sevan and Müjde were tired of using Photoshop® to erase this building whenever they had to take publicity pictures of Şirince. So they decided to buy it instead and dress it up so it would look less ugly in the pictures. That is how the Inn was born. It received its first guests in July 2001.

The Authorities did not look kindly on all this. The Authorities were not used to people doing things on their own. The Nişanyans had outstepped their boundaries when they organized petitions, battled official corruption and brought Şirince into national attention. Moreover they had a funny surname that did not sound Turkish at all, and caused grave suspicions about their True Motives. The Authorities geared into action. They brought nine charges of Illegal Building Activity against Sevan. They failed eight, but carried one. Sevan went to jail for 10 months in 2001. He took the time to finish his long-standing project, an etymological dictionary of the Turkish language. It was published at the end of 2002.

The public went up in a roar. The Nişanyan case was in the national papers every day for over a year. There were the pro-Nişanyans and the anti-Nişanyans. Government ministers came to Şirince to investigate the case. The New York Times and Le Monde covered the story. The good guys, of course, won in the end. In February 2004 Sevan was awarded the prestigious Freedom of Thought Award of the Human Rights Association of Turkey.

It wasn't quite the idyllic, peaceful village life that Müjde and Sevan had dreamed of. But can they complain? (May 2004)