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There are no cars in Buyukada. Not one, so far as I am aware. Of all the wonderful things about this beautiful island, this is perhaps the most wonderful. Yes, all right, there is the occasional truck, the property of the water board or the garbage disposal people or the army or the police, but there really are no cars. You can either walk, or bicycle, or ride in a horse-drawn carriage - a surrey with a fringe on top like the one immortalised by the song in Oklahoma – drawn, if you so chose, by a pair of matched bays or greys.

There are hundreds of horses on the island (apparently over two thousand which live, with their keepers, in a sort of gypsy shanty town a couple of miles from Buyukada’s only town); they often are seen wandering loose through the streets of the town and they all seem to be in reasonable nick, probably because they represent their owner’s livelihood. One’s animal-loving heart doesn’t break at the sight of them, though the numerous, straggly cats do cause a pang. But they’re probably OK too; there are so many restaurants and so much fish that I doubt they go hungry. One evening, as I sat eating my dinner, I watched a waiter from the Lido restaurant play for hours with a nondescript moggy, dangling a piece of string from a stick while the cat leapt in the air. I couldn’t have told it apart from the other cats hanging around hoping for scraps, but they were chased off while this animal was given its choice of fish and much loving care.

Buyukada – which means, literally, the big island (“buyuk” is big; “ada” is island) – is the largest and most beautiful of the Princes’ Islands, an archipelago of nine small islands in the Sea of Marmara near Istanbul. Once a place of exile for disgraced patriarchs and Byzantine princes (Leon Trotsky also lived on Buyukada for several years in the 1920s and here began his monumental “History of the Russian Revolution”), it has been, since the establishment of a ferry service in the mid-nineteenth century, a summer resort for smart people from Istanbul, who built themselves beautiful, elaborate, wooden houses. You get there by ferry, which takes about an hour and a half or, in high season – May-September, by sea bus (half an hour).

Istanbul now is so busy, so noisy, so crowded, so teeming, so polluted that, fascinating as it is, I can’t any more bear to stay there. Buyukada is the perfect antidote. If, on a clear day, you look across the Sea of Marmara, you can see the angular silhouettes of Bostanci, Maltepe and Kartal, those densely-populated, intensively built-up outer suburbs of Istanbul; they look like a larger, less elegant Manhattan, and seem alarmingly near. I prefer it when it’s hazy and the Asian shore looks far away. There’s a point at dusk, before the million lights on the far coast are turned on, when the sea and sky merge to become one, a limpid eternity, and there is just a wall of grey-blue. I love it when the sea is like glass, when time has, apparently, stood still.

The open-air dance or exercise class taking place early one Friday morning under the watchful gaze of a statue of the ubiquitous Attaturk, the father of modern Turkey, in front of a still-unfinished (for the past seven years) hotel as part of the preparations for some public-spirited national holiday (National Youth Day perhaps), was typically conducted to the strains of a slowed-down instrumental version of Voi Che Sapete from Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro. I love the reassuring continuity of Buyukada, the way it doesn’t seem to change. But perhaps that’s just an illusion.

The calm, the peace of Buyukada, always fills me with a profound contentment. Even on weekends, when day-trippers from the city surge off the ferries to spend the day picnicking in the pine woods or crowding out the restaurants, then wander through the town eating ice creams, Buyukada never really loses its tranquillity. The nineteenth-century French writer Gustave Schlumberger, author of Les Isles Des Princes, wrote of “ces îles charmantes, lieu de repos et de plaisir”, of “leur silhouettes enchanteresses”, before going on to describe their long and bloody history.

Buyukada smells of sea and jasmine and grilling meat and fish and cats’ pee and horses; the only sounds you hear are the clip of the horses’ hooves; the clinking of the harnesses; the querulous, teething-baby cries of the seagulls; the strangulated screams of the fighting or mating cats (these two are often indistinguishable), and the fog-horn call of boats arriving and departing all day long from dawn until midnight. At night, the horses and phaetons wait to take diners home from the fish restaurants along the waterfront. The horses, ready harnessed, wait in a large square behind the main drag, hidden from view, and next to the entrance to the lovely, almost-impossible-to-find Greek Orthodox Church of St. George; they stand patiently, occasionally shifting in their harnesses and stamping their feet, their harnesses jingling and creaking, their owners talking softly and hissing to soothe them.

In the dark, only the candles, which twinkle in the little lamp holders on the carriages, light the square. The warm air is redolent of the rich, earthy smell of horse, an ineffably delicious blend of sweat and dung. The first time I saw the square at night and the horses, I thought it was the most romantic sight I had ever seen. It haunted me. It was the main reason I wanted to go back to Buyukada.

I have only been visiting Buyukada for seven years. I first went there in 1994 in August as the guest of the American writer, Edmund White, who had rented an apartment above the town. I had never heard of the Princes’ Islands, nor had any of my friends, but Albert Dichy, Edmund’s collaborator on his biography of Jean Genet, had been coming there for years, and Edmund had come to know it through him. The islanders were not used to renting apartments and the one we had was barely equipped, but it had a long terrace overlooking the Sea of Marmara where we would sit and work.

Buyukada then seemed to have a kind of innocent, Edwardian quality. Businessman returned home from a hard, hot day in Istanbul while their wives languidly fanned themselves on the balconies and the verandas of their summer houses and nursemaids chased after small children in sailor suits. In the early evening, couples, old and young, strolled arm-in-arm, the free arm holding an ice-cream cone. Elderly ladies played cards and gossiped on the terrace of the Splendid Hotel. The most important decision you would have to make in any given day was which restaurant to go to for dinner (they were all basically the same, but some would be mysteriously more popular than others) and what kind of fish to eat.

Would it be sea bass, or bream, or turbot? Would you have it grilled or fried? Or may be a kebab for a change? Which of the ten or fifteen delicious mese on offer would you have? The air was full of the scent of flowers and fish. Nobody spoke a word of English. Very occasionally, as I was struggling with a vocabulary of ten Turkish words in one of the shops, an old woman would come to my aid with French (until the invasion of Cyprus in 1974, it was mainly well-off Greeks from Istanbul, who spoke French, who came to Buyukada in the summer). It felt safe. It was safe.

It still is all those things, I think. Safe, old-fashioned. On the whole. This time, however, when I went on my first night to have dinner in what had always been my favourite restaurant, Birtat, I found it closed and deserted. One of the owners had shot someone with whom he was having a disagreement – the Mafia, the Kurdish Mafia that is, were involved – and the friends of the dead man had retaliated by killing one of the other owners. It wasn’t safe to re-open the restaurant. This is a sign, local residents say, of the changing times.

There have been other changes too. The jetty by the exquisite neo-Orientalist hexagonal ticket office is in the process of being widened, thereby destroying the original perfect proportions; you can now hire bicycles; one of the ice-cream parlours in town has started calling itself “Icecream Center” and there is an Internet café. My room at the Splendid boasted a television and new carpet and furniture. A fit-looking man in his sixties spent hours jet-skiing alongside the ferry as it goes from Heybeliada to Buyukada. He is the widower of the heiress to the most famous Turkish Delight firm in Istanbul. When his wife died, his doctor suggested he take up a hobby. This was it.

But the essence of Buyukada seemed unchanged. Whether it will continue so, remains to be seen. The wooden, turn-of-the-century houses now cost a fortune and the new, rich people buying and renovating them, or buying them to demolish them in order to build big, new, time-share apartment blocks, want to bring in cars. They say that Buyukada smells of horseshit – they worry, or they claim to worry, about what visitors to the island will think (they shouldn’t, there is never dung on the roads – it falls into a neat pouch suspended just below the horses’ hindquarters); they claim of being driven mad by the cries of the seagulls - the siren song of the island - and some people have taken to shooting at the gulls. The cobbled streets went some years ago.

A woman who was born in Buyukada and still spends much of her time there told me, “Buyukada used to be an open-air museum. This island has a microclimate, unlike the rest of the Istanbul area, and plants, which will not grow elsewhere, will grow here. But now there are no more beautiful gardens, just a bit of lawn and a few roses.” The same woman deplores the sea buses, those fast, soulless catamarans that sweep up to the hideous sea bus terminal. She wants to know why everyone is in such a hurry. What, she wonders, is wrong with the leisurely ferry journey to Istanbul, which deposits you at Sirkeçi conveniently near the Spice Bazaar? If you go or come to the islands by boat, which anyway tends to be more convenient because the boats are more frequent, you can chill out on the journey, recovering from the stress of Istanbul, snoozing on the wooden benches, drinking fresh orange juice or tea, enjoying the view and the breeze, taking time out.

The pace of life on Buyukada is necessarily leisurely – the absence of cars; the frequency of the boats (only in high summer are there daily sea buses); the lack of shopping (apart from for the basic necessities) and bargaining (a couple of jewellers and one carpet merchant are the token establishments); the small population (about 6,000), all determine that – but progress is always seen to be desirable and it always destroys a place. The day that the Splendid Hotel, which was built in 1906 on the model of the Negresco Hotel in Nice and is still owned by the descendants of the original owner, is renovated will be the day that I cease to visit Buyukada.

At present, there seems little chance of that. Out of season its only clients are myself and the occasional backpacker who has found his way to Buyukada. I once stayed there for ten days in April and was the sole guest the entire time. The hotel, however, is booked solid in July and August every year. Its regular clientele (not one of whom is a day under eighty - the manager, who has been there for thirty years, calls them the “gold” ladies) likes it just the way it is. And so do I.

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