A tourist has told how she was suddenly ambushed and bitten by a giant sea turtle and feared she would drown while on a morning swim in a popular Mediterranean resort.
Lidia Bazarova, 64, was only 10ft from the shore when the monster creature sank its sharp beak into her backside.
The Russian pensioner - who needed hospital treatment from the terrifying attack - said: “I wasn’t expecting anything, I was really close to shore - some three or four metres - when I just turned onto my back and lay like this.
“Then something grabbed my backside. It was really scary.
“I didn’t know what it was that suddenly grabbed me."
The large turtle tried to drag her under the water as she flapped her arms around in the water.
She added: “I was drowning. The creature let me go only to grab me with an even stronger bite. I don’t know how long it lasted.”
The tourist hugged her daughter Kamila for comfort as she explained: "Luckily a rescuer man saw me. He rushed to me and started to yell at [the creature]. I guess it switched attention to the rescuer.”
Freed from the huge sea turtle’s grasp she made for the beach in a state of deep shock, and the rescuer then battled the beast eventually scaring it away.
“I raced towards the shore,” said Lidia. "I don’t know how he was, but his arm is broken. I was fighting my pain and my fear. Morally it was awful.”
Lidia, from Yekaterinburg, suffered wounds on her buttocks, hip, legs and fingers from the sharp beak and powerful jaw.
She found it hard to sit comfortably after her battle with the sea turtle.
She came to this spot every other day in resort Güzeolaba, she said, but not any more.
“I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to get back in the sea,” Lidia told IHA news agency.
The hero rescuer was named as lifeguard Mustafa Sarı, and reports say he was bitten on the shoulder.
The loggerhead sea turtle - called the Caretta Caretta - is carnivorous, and can weigh as much as a dairy cow.
The woman’s buttocks were badly bruised, said reports in Antalya.
“We thank the lifeguard,” said Kamila. Without him, maybe the result would have been bad. There were similar cases before. It bit a woman and a man before my mother. We want a warning posted about this danger.
“It is terrible that we will no longer go into the sea.”
Turkish expert Professor Mehmet Gökoğlu said turtles were prone to attack humans who were in their “living space”.
“There are cases of biting in shallow waters,” he said.
A report said there had been 11 separate turtle attacks in the past two weeks.
