Orhan Menteşe Çiftliği

The story

This is Rauf's family farm. It lies among Memecik olive trees in Ağaçlıhöyük, a village on the flat plain past Milas on the road to Bodrum, just before the airport. The family's site calls it Menteşe Çiftliği, and its header reads 'since 1909'.

The family story starts with a love match. Murat Salih Menteşe, a young Ottoman cavalry officer who opposed Sultan Abdülhamit's rule, fled to Paris and there married a French woman, Suzanne Dugeny, in 1908. They settled in Milas, where he farmed the family land. The house he built for her is still called Madam Murat's house, and she lived in Milas until her death in 1976, aged 95.

Their grandchildren Ali Osman and Sitare Menteşe took up the groves and began pressing their own oil on the farm in 2004, within 12 hours of harvest. They named it Som, from the letters of Sitare, Osman and Menteşe. It won a Monde Selection silver medal in 2009 and an ITQI gold in 2012, and an oil called Suzan Nine marked the grandparents' hundredth anniversary.