Two sisters from Istanbul who made Kabalana home

In 2017, we left our careers and the lives we knew behind, looking for a different way of living. For almost two years, we travelled around the world, sharing our journey through Sisters Away and hoping to inspire more Turkish women to travel.

When we returned to Sri Lanka for the second time in 2019, we realised that it had become much more than a place we loved visiting. It felt like somewhere we could build a life and call home.

We wanted to share the island life we had fallen in love with — not as something our guests would simply see, but something they could become part of. At the same time, we wanted Sisters to feel warm and familiar: a place where guests could slow down, settle in and find little pieces of home, even when far from their own.

We started with a four-room boutique guesthouse. In the beginning, it was just the two of us. We painted and decorated every room ourselves and welcomed every guest.

Soon after, our love of good coffee, food and tables that bring people together led us to open a tiny café in the guesthouse garden. It later moved to its own home across the road from the beach. We grew up around long, crowded tables, where food was made to be shared and there was always room for one more. We wanted to recreate that feeling here — bringing people from all over the world together around the same table to share Turkish and Mediterranean flavours, stories and time.

As Sisters grew, talented women from our village and the surrounding area joined us. None of us knew exactly what Sisters would become. We learned as we went — how to run a guesthouse, build a café, bake, cook from scratch, make coffee, lead a kitchen and look after a growing business. What started with two sisters slowly became a team of fourteen women, building and running Sisters together.

Today, Sisters is a café, a boutique guesthouse and a private villa. It has grown far beyond what we imagined in the beginning, but what matters to us has stayed the same: sharing the life we have built here and welcoming people with the same warmth we grew up with.

Sisters has never been only a place to eat or stay. We hope the home we found here can feel a little like home to everyone who finds their way to us.

Greetings from the island,
Burcu & Burçin :)