Hotels Guide - Travel Guide

Although first fortified in the Hellenistic period following the area’s conquest by Alexander the Great, the castle rock was likely inhabited under the Hittites and the Persian Empire.[6] Finds in the nearby Kadrini cave indicate occupation during the Paleolithic era as far back as 20,000 BC. A Phoenician language tablet found in the district dates to 625 BC, and the city is specifically mentioned in the 4th-century BC Greek geography manuscript, the periplus of Pseudo-Scylax.[7] Alexander’s successors left the area to Ptolemy I Soter after 323 BC. His dynasty maintained loose control over the mainly Isaurian population, and the port became a popular refuge for Mediterranean pirates.[2] The city resisted Antiochus III the Great of the neighboring Seleucid kingdom in 199 BC, but was loyal to the pirate Diodotus Tryphon when he seized the Seleucid crown from 142 to 138 BC. His rival Antiochus VII Sidetes completed work in 137 BC on a new castle and port, begun under Diodotus Tryphon.[8]

The Roman Republic fought Cilician pirates in 102 BC, when Marcus Antonius the Orator established a proconsulship in nearby Side, and in 78 BC under Servilius Vatia, who moved on the Isaurian tribes.[9] The period of piracy in Alanya finally ended after the city’s incorporation into the Pamphylia province by Pompey in 67 BC, with the Battle of Korakesion fought in the city’s harbor.[10] Isaurian banditry remained an issue under the Romans, and the tribes revolted in the forth and fifth centuries AD, with the largest rebellion being from 404 to 408.[11] After the Roman Empire’s collapse and split, the city remained under Byzantine influence, becoming a suffragan of Side, in the metropolis of Pamphylia Prima.[12] Islam arrived in the 7th century with Arab raids, which led to the construction of new fortifications.[7] 681 marked the end of a bishopric in Alanya, although St. Peter of Atroa may have taken refuge here from iconoclastic persecution in the early 9th century.[12][13] The area fell from Byzantine control after the Battle of Manzikert in 1071 to tribes of Seljuk Turks, only to be returned in 1120 by John II Komnenos.[14]

Following the Fourth Crusade, the Christian Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia periodically held the port, and it was from an Armenian, Kir Fard, that the Turks took lasting control in 1221 when the Anatolian Seljuk Sultan Alaeddin Keykubad I captured it, assiging the former ruler, whose daughter he married, to the governance of the city of AkÅŸehir.[15] Seljuk rule saw the golden age of the city, and it can be considered the winter capital of their empire.[16] Building projects, including the twin citadel, city walls, arsenal, and Kızıl Kule, made it an important seaport for western Mediterranean trade, particularly with Ayyubid Egypt and the Italian city-states.[17] Alaeddin Keykubad I also constructed numerous gardens and pavilions outside the walls, and many of his works can still be found in the city. These were likely financed by his own treasury and by the local emirs, and constructed by the contractor Abu ‘Ali al-Kattani al-Halabi.[6] Alaeddin Keykubad I’s son, Sultan Gıyaseddin Keyhüsrev II, continued the building campaign with a new cistern in 1240.[18]
The Seljuk era Tersane was a drydock for ships.
The Seljuk era Tersane was a drydock for ships.

At the Battle of Köse Dağ in 1242, the Mongol hordes broke the Seljuk hegemony in Anatolia. Alanya was then subject to a series of invasions from Anatolian Turkish Beyliks. In 1293, the Karamanoğlu dynasty took control after Mecdüddin Mahmud conquered the city, but their rule was intermittent.[19] Lusignans from the Cyprus briefly overturned the then ruling Hamidoğlu Beylik in 1371.[20] The Karamanoğlu sold the city in 1427 for 5,000 gold coins to the Mamluks of Egypt for a period before the general Gedik Ahmed Pasha in 1471 incorporated it into the growing Ottoman Empire. The city was made a capital of a local sanjak in the eyalet of Içel.[3] The Ottomans extended their rule in 1477 when they brought the main shipping trade, lumber, then mostly done by Venetians, under the government monopoly.[17] On September 6, 1608, the city rebuffed an naval attack by the Order of Saint Stephen from the Republic of Venice.[4]

Trade in the region was negatively impacted by the development of an oceanic route from Europe around Africa to India, and in the tax registers of the late sixteenth century, Alanya failed to qualify as an urban center.[21] In 1571 the Ottomans designated the city as part of the newly conquered province of Cyprus.[7] The conquest further diminished the economic importance of Alanya’s port. Traveler Evliya Çelebi visited the city in 1671/1672, and wrote on the preservation of Alanya Castle, but also on the dilapidation of Alanya’s suburbs.[3] The city was reassigned in 1864 under Konya, and in 1868 under Antalya, as it is today.[7] During the 18th and 19th centuries numerous villas were built in the city by Ottoman nobility, and civil construction continued under the local dynastic Karamanid authorities.[2] Bandits again became common across Antalya Province in the mid-nineteenth century.[22]

After World War I, Alanya was nominally partitioned in the 1917 Agreement of St.-Jean-de-Maurienne to Italy, before returning to the Turkish Republic in 1923 under the Treaty of Lausanne.[23] Like others in this region, the city suffered heavily following the war and the population exchanges that heralded the Turkish Republic, when many of the city’s Christians resettled in Nea Ionia, outside Athens. The Ottoman census of 1893 listed the number of Greeks in the city at 964 out of a total population of 37,914.[24] Tourism in the region started among Turks who came to Alanya in the 1960s for the alleged healing properties of DamlataÅŸ Cave, and later the access provided by Antalya Airport in 1998 allowed the town to grow into an international resort. Strong population growth through the 1990s was a result of immigration to the city, and has driven a rapid modernization of the infrastructure.[25]

Bodrum Castle

The first recorded settlers in Bodrum region were the Carians and the harbor area was colonized by Dorian Greeks as of the 7th century BC and the city later fell under Persian rule. It was the nominal capital city of the satrapy of Caria. Its location ensured the city enjoyed considerable autonomy.

Herodotus, the historian, (484-420 BC) was born here.

Mausolus ruled Caria from here on behalf of the Persians, from 377 to 353 BC. When he died in 353 BC, Artemisia II of Caria, who was both his sister and his widow, employed the ancient Greek architects Satyros and Pythis, and the four sculptors Bryaxis, Scopas, Leochares and Timotheus for to build a monument, as well as a tomb, for him. The word “mausoleum” derives from the structure of this tomb. It was a temple-like structure decorated with reliefs and statuary on a massive base. It stood for 1700 years and was finally destroyed by earthquakes.[citation needed] Today only the foundations and a few pieces of sculpture remain.

Alexander the Great laid siege on the city after his arrival in Carian lands and its capture was, in all likelihood, completed by his ally, queen Ada of Caria.

Crusader Knights arrived in 1402 and used the remains of the Mauseoleum as a quarry to build the still impressively standing Bodrum Castle (Castle of Saint Peter), which is also particular in being one of the last examples of Crudader architecture in the East.
Bodrum marina
Bodrum marina

The Knights Hospitaller of Rhodes were given the permission to build it by the Ottoman sultan Mehmed I, after Tamerlane had destroyed their previous fortress located in Izmir’s inner bay. The castle and its town became known as Petronium, whence the modern name Bodrum derives. Conveniently, the word “Bodrum” means basement in Turkish, and a common pun in reference to the town’s liberal morals decline its name as “Bedroom”.

In 1522, Suleyman the Magnificent conquered the base of the Crusader knights on the island of Rhodes, who then withdrew to Malta, leaving The Castle of Saint Peter and Bodrum to the Ottoman Empire.

[edit] Economy
A market in Bodrum
A market in Bodrum

A quiet town of fishermen and sponge divers until the mid-20th century, Bodrum was popularized among Turkey’s educated classes by a group of intellectuals centered around the writer Cevat Åžakir KabaaÄŸaçlı, who himself had first come here in exile. Since then, Bodrum constantly endeavored to attract people with artistic backgrounds, encouraging them to choose the region as a location for their secondary residences and many of the these people gradually became regulars who would stay throughout the year. Bodrum now hosts many poets, singers, artists, as well as commercially-minded investors and package tourists. Differences between the sensitivities of the first groups of residents, adamant in defending Bodrum’s heritage and soul, with the interests of the latters is an always imminent issue and one that surfaces frequently. For example, a group of trees felled in Bodrum for any reason is very likely to make local and even national news in Turkey.

The Bodrum region has attracted considerable foreign and domestic investment in real estate, specifically in second homes for customers from across Turkey as well as from Western Europe.

The current permanent population for the town of Bodrum was recorded as 32,227 in 2000 census although it is certainly much higher in reality, and reaches several times that figure in summer.

The sheltered anchorage contains yachts and locally-built gulets used by seafaring tourists.