by Dimana Trankova; photography by Anthony Georgieff

Anyone who has ventured as far south as Rezovo on the Bulgarian Black Sea coast has one tantalising memory: the enormous, completely empty beach seen from Rezovo's self-styled village square. It is huge, the sand looks extremely fine, and there is no one in sight: just the type of thing you could experience in Bulgaria before the Great Construction Boom of the mid-2000s. You don't get beaches like that in Europe anymore, you catch yourself thinking. They belong to Southeast Asia or the Caribbean, don't they; yet this one is right in front of you, within an arm's length's reach.

Trouble is that it isn't. It is across the Rezovo River, in Turkish territory, and despite various promises by a succession of post-Communist governments no bridge over it is likely to be built any time soon. To reach it, you have to do a 150-mile detour through the Strandzha. If you do, every minute of it will be rewarded.

The northern Black Sea coast of Turkey is waiting to be discovered and in spite of some indications that nouveaux riches Bulgarians are already trying to buy properties there, nothing of the Sunny Beach or Sozopol sort is to be expected during the next five-six years. The coastline of Trakya, as most of European Turkey is known, remains frozen at least three decades ago in Europe's history of mass tourism. And the town of Kıyıköy is its crown jewel.

As you pass through one of the brick gates in the Byzantine fortress wall that divides Kıyıköy from the mainland, you may think that in this little town of 2,500 on Turkey's European Black Sea coast nothing ever happens.