Wings Over Oludeniz: A Leap into the Aegean Sky

My wife wasn’t exactly thrilled when I told her I wanted to jump off a mountain. We were on a languid family holiday in Ölüdeniz, on Turkey’s Aegean coast, the kind where days stretch lazily and the air tastes of salt and summer. And yet there I was, booking a tandem paraglide from the summit of Mount Babadağ. She laughed and labeled it a midlife crisis; I called it a long-delayed dream.

That dream began more than two decades ago, on my first visit to Ölüdeniz as a wide-eyed nine-year-old. We had parked ourselves near the cusp of the famed Blue Lagoon—a stretch of sea so calm and cerulean it seemed imagined. Each morning, the sky bloomed with colour as dozens of paragliders floated silently above us, crescent wings gliding like strokes on a blue canvas. I remember wondering what it would feel like to leave the ground behind. To escape gravity, routine, and noise.

It seems I wasn’t alone in that longing. The human desire to fly predates even history. From Paleolithic cave paintings to the myth of Icarus, the dream of flight has flickered through our collective imagination. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that such yearning crystallised in a region like this, where life has always been lived between land and sea, heaven and horizon.

That morning, I managed to coax my brother-in-law, Biggi, into joining me. A minibus collected us just after sunrise, the early light soft and forgiving. We drove skyward, the road soon narrowing into a serpentine track that clung precariously to the mountain’s edge. To distract myself from the drop, I peppered our pilots with questions. “Why Babadağ?” I asked. One smiled and said simply: “You’ll see.”

History, as it turns out, also soars here. The story of Hezarfen Ahmet Çelebi, a 17th-century Ottoman aviator who supposedly glided from Istanbul’s Galata Tower across the Bosphorus with wooden wings, is rooted in Turkish folklore. And while his feat dances between myth and truth, there’s no doubting Babadağ’s real status today: one of the world’s premier paragliding launch points, with nearly 200,000 flights a year.

By the time we reached the peak, just shy of 2,000 meters above sea level, the scale of the drop became unnervingly clear. The mountain’s face fell away almost vertically to the glinting sea below. A bitter wind swept across the launch pad as my pilot, Onur, buckled us into a shared harness. Instructions were minimal. “Run,” he said. “Don’t stop.”

And then—we were flying.

The moment our feet left the ground, everything changed. The cold, the nerves, the tightness in my chest—all dissolved. We slipped into silence. The wind cradled us like a hammock in the sky. Below, the Aegean shimmered, the lagoon curved in its famous aquamarine, and sun-washed hills rolled endlessly beyond.

There’s a kind of sacred quiet up there, a hush that invites reflection. From above, the Mediterranean doesn’t feel like a place you visit. It feels like a memory you’re returning to. I thought about my childhood self on that beach, craning his neck skyward. I thought about the ancient sailors who once navigated these waters using stars, winds, and instinct. And I thought about how, in this restless modern world, so few moments ask us to truly let go.

Biggi and his pilot glided alongside us like old seabirds. We exchanged grins midair, our voices lost to the wind. For forty minutes, we danced across the sky, descending in lazy spirals, skimming thermals, tracing arcs that felt both ancient and entirely new.

When our feet finally touched the soft sand of Ölüdeniz beach, I felt giddy. Not just from the adrenaline, but from a kind of clarity—like I’d touched something that had been calling me for years.

And maybe that’s what the Mediterranean gives us, time and again. Whether through food or ritual, a breeze off the water or a leap from a mountaintop—it offers us a return to wonder.