Kaptan June
An English conservationist in Türkiye
June Haimoff has lived in Dalyan, Türkiye, since the mid-1980s. There she is passionately committed to protecting the endangered sea turtle ‘Caretta caretta’. Iztuzu Beach is one of its most important nesting beaches. When a large hotel complex was to be built there, June launched an international protest campaign. With success: the construction project was stopped, and today the beach is part of a protected area.
The people of Dalyan call her ‘Kaptan June’. Before she settled in Türkiye, she spent several years travelling on her boat — a woman as captain, which was unusual at the time. On one of those voyages she discovered Iztuzu Beach and fell in love with it at first sight. In 1984 she sold her boat and spent three summers in a simple wooden hut right on the beach. “That was the best time of my life,” she says in the film. Back then she was the only foreigner on the beach; the other huts belonged to locals who wanted to escape the heat and the mosquitoes.
On one of those nights on the beach she saw a turtle for the first time and watched the ‘Caretta caretta’ bury more than 100 eggs in the warm sand. The animal built the nest for it like an engineer! From that moment on she was a different person, June says in the film, with tears in her eyes. A turning point in her life. When she learned a little later that the beach was to be built on, she took action. With the support of the media, Kaptan June, conservationists from all over the world and committed people from Dalyan prevented the already-started construction project from being realised at the end of the 1980s. Today the beach is closed at night so the turtles can lay their eggs undisturbed. And there is only one small café at each end of the beach, which is more than four kilometres long.
It was not only the hotel that was stopped. When tourism began, the locals’ huts on the beach also had to be torn down. June moved to Dalyan, 10 km away, and bought a small house there. She took her beach hut with her and set it up in her garden. But a few years ago the hut returned to the beach and became a kind of museum, where Kaptan June’s story is told and visitors are informed about the current problems. At the time of our filming, visitors could regularly meet the conservationist there in person.
And in 2011 June set up a foundation dedicated to preserving the sea turtles’ natural habitat and protecting them from the effects of tourism. For every year more tourists come to the beach, most of them just for a day, to see a piece of supposedly untouched nature. The number of boats offering trips to the ‘turtle beach’ has grown steadily. Kaptan June’s foundation now offers all captains to fit the propellers of their boats with a kind of protective cage so the turtles are not injured.
When Barbara Trottnow first came to Dalyan in 1991, June Haimoff was the first person she met on Iztuzu Beach. And at that time the remains of a construction pit could still be seen on the beach. A hotel with 600 beds had been planned, a Turkish-German construction project funded with money from German development aid. The hotel was not built, but the beach never regained the untouched state it had before. The pit was filled in and serves as a car park today.
For June Haimoff, the protective measures do not go far enough. In her view there are now far too many sunbeds and umbrellas on the beach, restricting the area where the turtles can lay their eggs. June is particularly outraged by the boat tours on which turtles are fed in order to show them to tourists at close range. In the film she explains impressively why the beach and the whole area should be a destination for ecotourism – and not a place where the only aim is to make a lot of money fast.