Antalya

The city was founded in the 2nd century BC by Attalos II of Pergamon, who named it Attaleia after himself and gave it the harbour that is still the heart of the old town. It passed with the Attalid kingdom to Rome, and in 130 AD the emperor Hadrian visited; the triple marble gate built for the occasion survives in the line of the walls. Under Rome and Byzantium the port served the province of Pamphylia, whose inland cities — Perge, Aspendos, Side — were larger and richer than Attaleia itself. St Paul sailed from here on his first missionary journey, according to the Book of Acts.

Seljuk Turks took the city in 1207, and a brief Byzantine restoration was ended in 1216; the fluted minaret that became its emblem was raised under Alaeddin Keykubad I soon afterwards. The Turkish principality of Teke ruled it before the Ottomans absorbed it in the 15th century. Under Ottoman rule Antalya was a modest port with a mixed Muslim, Greek Orthodox and Armenian population; Italian forces occupied it briefly after the First World War, and the Greek Orthodox community left in the population exchange of 1923.

The modern city is a creation of the last fifty years. It had about thirty thousand people in 1920; large-scale development began in the 1970s, the coast was designated for tourism development in the 1980s, and hotels, greenhouses and apartment blocks spread along the shore. Kaleiçi, run down and half-abandoned, was restored from the 1980s as a conservation area and became the tourist centre. Antalya now ranks among the most visited destinations in the world by arrivals — fourth among cities by foreign visitors in recent counts — and the city has grown to about 1.5 million people.

Antalya is a holiday city in a conservative region, and the two sides sit alongside each other. In Kaleiçi and along the resort strips the visitor sees multilingual menus, bars and international crowds — Russian, German, British and, increasingly, visitors from across the Gulf and Central Asia; a few streets inland the city is ordinary provincial Turkey, with tea gardens, mosque courtyards and families walking the seafront in the evening.

The old Ottoman fabric of the walled quarter is central to local identity: the restoration of its wooden-fronted houses is often cited as a model for Turkish conservation, and won the district an international tourism award in 1984. The province's cultural calendar reaches beyond the city — opera and ballet in the ancient theatre at Aspendos each summer, and the Golden Orange film festival, among the oldest in the country, which takes its name from the citrus that made the plain rich before tourism did.

In the mountains behind the coast, Yörük families still move flocks to summer pasture and weave kilims from goat hair, and their culture is a source of local pride in a province otherwise defined by resorts. Football matters here as everywhere in Turkey, and evening life runs late in summer, when the city empties onto the beaches, the parks along the cliffs and the promenades after dark.

Antalya's urban population is around 1.5 million and the province holds more than 2.7 million, swollen further each summer. Growth has been fast and continuous: internal migration from inland Anatolia, a large Russian and Ukrainian community, and more recently arrivals from Iran and elsewhere in the region have all added to a population that was a fraction of its present size within living memory.

The economy rests on two things that both depend on the climate. Tourism employs an enormous share of the workforce, directly and through construction, transport and retail. Agriculture is the other pillar: the plain and the coastal strip are covered with greenhouses growing tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and cut flowers for export, and the province's citrus, pomegranates, avocados and bananas supply much of Turkey. Cruise and cargo traffic uses the port at the western edge of the city.

Daily life follows the heat. Work and shopping start early, the middle of a summer day is spent indoors or in the sea, and the streets fill again after sunset. Winter is the working season for hotels' maintenance and for agriculture, and the city is noticeably calmer. Local issues are those of rapid growth: rents driven up partly by foreign buyers and long-stay residents, water supply and irrigation in a drying climate, traffic on a city stretched thin along a coastline, and the wildfires that threaten the forests inland in high summer.

Antalya's own cooking is simple, seasonal and vegetable-heavy, closer to the Aegean than to the kebab country further east. Piyaz is the local emblem: haricot beans dressed with tahini, vinegar, garlic and olive oil, scattered with parsley, onion and hard-boiled egg, and eaten with grilled köfte in restaurants that make little else. Şakşuka of fried aubergine, courgette and pepper in tomato sauce, hibeş — a tahini and cumin dip — and tarhana soup made from dried fermented yoghurt and grain appear on every meze table.

Fish and seafood come from the gulf and are grilled plainly with lemon and rocket, often at the old harbour or along the beach parks. From the mountain districts come lamb dishes, kabak tatlısı — candied pumpkin served with tahini and walnuts — and the cheeses and yoghurt of the yayla pastures. Serpme kahvaltı, the sprawling Turkish breakfast of cheeses, olives, eggs, tomatoes, honey and clotted kaymak, is a weekend institution.

The province supplies its own fruit in quantity: oranges, lemons and mandarins from the plain, pomegranates, figs, avocados and bananas grown along the warm coastal strip towards Alanya and Anamur. To drink there are freshly squeezed juices, ayran with grilled meat, şalgam brought west from Adana, and syrups of tamarind and liquorice root sold from brass vessels in the old town, along with tea in tulip glasses at every hour and rakı with a meze table in the evening.