Gulet sailboats: a Turkish hull type, not a single builder's line
"Gulet" is not the name of a company. It names a hull and rig type built in the Turkish Aegean's traditional yards, the way "ketch" or "trawler" names a type rather than a manufacturer. Turkey's Turquoise Coast tradition actually distinguishes three related but separate boat types under one loosely applied popular vocabulary: the gulet itself, the tirhandil, and the ayna kıç, a square-sterned cousin of the gulet hull. Wooden yacht construction in Turkey began in Bodrum, which is why boats built there carry a sturdier build and a different look from gulets built elsewhere -- and why the name is tied to one town's shipbuilding tradition rather than to one company.
That looseness runs deep. Ağanlar Tersane, one of Bodrum's founding gulet yards, notes that ketches, mirror-stern boats, tirhandils, and schooners are all still popularly called "gulet" by people unfamiliar with the differences between them -- a sign of how far the word has drifted from a precise technical term toward a catch-all for "traditional Turkish wooden sailing boat."
A tradition, not a builder
The tradition is usually dated to the early 1960s. Ziya Güvendiren, known as Ziya Usta, is credited with building the first Bodrum-style gulets in 1962, working from Greek examples; his own apprentices -- Erol Ağan among them, alongside Junior Ziya and Ethem Mehmet -- carried the profession forward from there. Ağan, born in Bodrum in 1936 to a sea captain, worked alongside Ziya Usta and quickly became his right-hand man before, at age 25 in 1961, opening his own shipbuilding yard next to Bodrum Castle. That yard, now known as Ağanlar Tersane and based in İçmeler, southeast of central Bodrum, was described in a 2021 account as still run by Ağan's four sons. Ağan is remembered today as the "father of the gulet."
The earliest boats carried their own names rather than model numbers: Ziya Usta's first was called Heyamola; Ağan's first, an 18-meter boat, was named Balık. His second, the 21-meter Elpenor, was commissioned by an Argentine client and, per Daily Sabah, became the second gulet ever introduced to the world.
What makes a hull a gulet
Hull form, more than rig, does the identifying work: a clipper, dipper-gourd-shaped bow and a rounded stern -- what Ağanlar Tersane calls a "watermelon" stern -- joined to a wine-glass-shaped midsection and a long overhang. The ayna kıç variant swaps in a square stern instead of a round one, on an otherwise similar hull.
The name itself started out describing something else entirely. Per the Bodrum Maritime Museum, "gulet" shares a root with the French "goélette" and Italian "goletta" and originally named a rig, not a hull -- specifically the schooner rig, a fore-and-aft rig of two or more masts flying gaff or lug sails, with the forward mast no taller than the after ones. That schooner rig is generally agreed to have been developed first by the Dutch and later refined and popularized by North Americans. The word's shift from naming a rig to naming a hull probably happened in Turkey itself: once schooner-rigged boats with round sterns became common there, "gulet" came to mean what the Greek term "karavoskaro" already meant -- a boat with a rounded stern.
That history sits oddly against the rig most gulets carry now. Ağanlar Tersane's own account describes the modern gulet as usually ketch-rigged; Daily Sabah instead describes gulets broadly as two-masted schooners. Either way, it is the hull, not the rig, that a listing is actually describing when it says "gulet."
Construction through the eras
Ağan's boats, and those that followed from his yard, were built from solid, indigenous wood -- larch and Pinus brutia, Turkish red pine. The type's working history predates its recreational one: in the 1970s, Ağan is credited with single-handedly transforming the boating and tourism industry by redesigning the "trata," regional fishing and sponge-harvesting schooners, into what became the modern Turkish gulet yacht. The stern shape took longer to settle than that redesign alone suggests -- Ağanlar Tersane's own history dates the earliest gulets' pointed, double-ended "scoop aft" stern as persisting until 1986, well after the tourism-era redesign began.
What has narrowed since, per the Bodrum Maritime Museum, is variety: a once-rich range of Bodrum hull and rig types has reduced mainly to the blue-voyage gulet and a small number of tirhandils, with modern Bodrum gulets built out with spacious cabins and large decks, in lengths reaching up to forty meters.
Who a gulet is for
A gulet suits someone drawn to a wooden boat carrying a documented regional craft tradition, rather than a single company's engineering pedigree. Daily Sabah notes that gulets today sail less than their two masts suggest, leaning on engine power to keep to a schedule instead of the wind. Choosing a gulet, in other words, means choosing a hull shape and a Bodrum building tradition -- not a marque.