Somewhere above Antalya, on a steep rocky slope where the trail dissolves into dry riverbeds and snake country, an 80-year-old shepherd named Mehmet was already halfway up the hill before his visitors had finished packing their bags. Drew Binsky and his Turkish friend Anil had driven deep into the rural mountains of southern Turkey with no address, only a general area and a rumor, to find a man who has spent 17 years alone in these mountains with his goats. What they discovered was not a cautionary tale about isolation but something far more complicated and harder to shake.
The search alone took hours. In the nearest town, a local pointed them toward the mountain. At a market, another man warned them not to bring Mehmet blankets or camping gear because, after two decades in the forest, he throws things like that away. So they loaded their packs with pasta, cooking oil, bread, watermelon, flea medicine for the goats, and a bag of sugar cubes that would later cause a small revelation.
The man who stopped counting days
Mehmet met them on a hillside path, surrounded by goats and moving with the kind of quiet efficiency that comes from doing the same walk every single day for years. He used to know his exact birth date, Anil translated, because he needed it to calculate things about the goat calendar. When thieves drove off with nearly 200 of his animals in a single night, he stopped counting. The goats were everything. Without them, the numbers stopped mattering.
That theft was the breaking point. Mehmet had been a shepherd his whole life, working land that belonged to wealthier families. After losing his herd to thieves who came with barbed wire and trucks, he took the few animals he had left and moved deeper into the mountains alone. He filed a police report. Nothing came of it. So he did what he described, through Anil’s translations, as a rebellious thing: ‘I am just going to do it on my own.’
His house is a low structure on the only flat surface for some distance in any direction. The floor is covered in goat droppings. Flies move through the air. He sleeps on one side, on what appears to be a flattened pile of bags. The roof, a patchwork of old wood thick with spider webs, looks ready to give. He keeps his goats inside at night because jackals have already taken two of the young ones.
What 17 years in the mountains actually looks like
Mehmet wakes before 5:30 in the morning. He hikes at a pace that leaves younger men behind, moving in small fast steps up rocky terrain that he knows stone by stone. He milks the one goat that will let him. He buys dry bread from restaurant leftovers in the village below, carries it back up, and shares it with the animals. He cooks maybe twice a week. He has not owned a phone because, he reasoned plainly, he is always running on rocks and would only lose it.
He ate half a kilogram of sugar cubes the same night Binsky and Anil gave them to him. He thought they were candy.
When Binsky finally asked the question that had been building for two days, whether Mehmet feels lonely, the answer came back fast and without hesitation. ‘No.’ A big no. He knows every stone, every tree, every path on this mountain. It is home.
At dinner, cooked over a camp stove about 50 meters from Mehmet’s shelter, the old man joined them and ate pasta with finely chopped onion, then watermelon. He pronounced the watermelon ripe, to his satisfaction, and seemed genuinely content. When the food was gone he said goodnight and disappeared into the dark without a light.
The bag of sugar he kissed
When Binsky handed over the supplies they had carried up the mountain, Mehmet kissed the bag of sugar.
He walks down to the village occasionally for leftovers and medicine for the goats. For everything else, he stays. He has not been to the city in several years. He says the mountain is free, and his goats are free on it, and that is reason enough.
