Bodrum

The town stands on Halicarnassus, a Dorian Greek foundation that became the seat of the Carian dynasty of the Hecatomnids in the 4th century BC. Mausolus moved his capital here and rebuilt the city on a grand scale; after his death his sister and widow Artemisia completed the monumental tomb that took his name, the Mausoleum, counted among the Seven Wonders of the ancient world. Herodotus, the first Greek historian, was born in the city in the 5th century BC. Alexander the Great besieged and largely destroyed it in 334 BC, and it never recovered its importance.

The Mausoleum stood for centuries before earthquakes brought it down. In the early 15th century the Knights Hospitaller of Rhodes built the Castle of St Peter on the headland, quarrying the ruins for stone, and the fortress gave the town its later name — Petronium became Bodrum. Suleiman the Magnificent took the castle in 1523 after the fall of Rhodes, and under the Ottomans it settled into a small harbour town of fishermen, boat builders and sponge divers.

That quiet lasted into the 20th century, when Bodrum was remote enough to serve as a place of internal exile. The writer Cevat Şakir Kabaağaçlı, exiled here in 1925 and known as the Fisherman of Halicarnassus, served his sentence in the town and made its coast famous in Turkish literature. The castle became a museum of underwater archaeology from the 1960s, an airport opened in the 1990s, and package holidays, marinas and second homes transformed the peninsula from the 1970s onward into one of the best-known resort areas in the country.

Bodrum has a reputation in Turkey for being liberal, artistic and expensive, in roughly equal measure. Since the mid-20th century it has drawn writers, painters and musicians as well as holidaymakers, an association that began with the Fisherman of Halicarnassus and his circle, and its identity as a place apart from mainstream Turkish conservatism is carefully maintained. The singer Zeki Müren, one of the great figures of Turkish classical song, lived his last years here, and his house is now a museum.

The sea shapes local culture more than anything else. Sponge diving supported the peninsula's villages for generations and is still remembered in Yalıkavak, once the area's main sponge-diving port, and the broad wooden gulet, built in the town's yards, is both a working boat and an emblem — the autumn regatta around the peninsula is the year's sailing event. The white cube houses with blue doors and windows, their walls traditionally limewashed for the insect-repellent properties of lime, give the town its recognisable look.

Summer nights are central to the town's character, with a long bar street, clubs and marina restaurants busy until dawn, while the inland villages of the peninsula keep to a slower, more traditional life of olive and tangerine farming. Visitors move between the two without difficulty, but dress and noise that pass on the seafront are noticed a few kilometres inland.

The district of Bodrum covers the whole peninsula, 689 square kilometres with 215 kilometres of coastline, and its permanent residents are spread across the town and the villages, a number that multiplies several times over in July and August. The town itself is modest in size; growth over the past fifty years has gone into the surrounding villages, which have merged into a near-continuous band of low white housing along the coast roads.

Tourism dominates the economy — hotels, restaurants, marinas, boat charters, property and construction — supported by yacht building and maintenance, fishing, and the farming that survives inland: olives, tangerines and market vegetables. Work is intensely seasonal, with many businesses trading for five or six months and staff arriving from elsewhere in Turkey for the summer.

The seasonal swing sets the rhythm of the year. Roads, water supply and rubbish collection strain in August and the peninsula empties in November, when many places shut and the resident population returns to its own routines. Long-running local concerns include the cost of housing, water shortages in dry summers, pressure from new building on the coastline, and wildfire risk in the pine hills behind the bays.

The Aegean style of cooking is at its clearest here: vegetables and wild greens simmered in olive oil and served cool, samphire dressed with lemon and garlic, stuffed courgette flowers, and cheese and herb pastries. Meze are the point of an evening meal, laid out in numbers and eaten slowly with rakı while the fish grills.

Fish and seafood follow the season — sea bass, bream, red mullet, octopus and calamari — and are usually cooked simply over charcoal. The dish most closely identified with the area is çökertme kebabı, strips of marinated veal laid over fried potato with garlic yoghurt and tomato sauce, named for a village in the neighbouring Milas district. Tarhana soup, made from dried fermented yoghurt and grain, is the regional winter staple.

The peninsula grows its own produce in the gaps between hotels: citrus from the groves behind Bitez, olives and olive oil, almonds and figs, and herbs gathered in spring. Markets rotate through the villages by day of the week and sell all of it alongside cheeses from the Muğla hills. The town's cafés serve Turkish coffee and tea from early morning to very late.