Fethiye

The town stands on Telmessos, the largest city of ancient Lycia and close to the Carian border, whose seers were renowned in the Greek world; Aristander of Telmessos served Alexander the Great in that role. The city was a member of the Delian League in the 5th century BC, and the rock tombs cut into the cliff above the harbour, the grandest of them the temple-fronted tomb attributed to Amyntas, date from the 4th century BC. Under Rome and then Byzantium it remained a working port, and in the Byzantine period it took the name Anastasiopolis before becoming known as Makri, the name that survived in Turkish as Meğri.

Turkish principalities and then the Ottomans took the coast from the 13th century onwards, and Meğri remained a mixed town, with a Greek Orthodox population living alongside Muslims and a hinterland of Greek villages of which Livissi, now Kayaköy, was the largest. The town grew considerably in the 19th century.

The 20th century remade the place twice over. The Greek population left in the compulsory exchange of populations agreed in 1923, emptying Kayaköy, and in 1934 the town was renamed Fethiye after Fethi Bey, one of the first pilots of the Ottoman air force, killed in a crash in 1914. In 1957 a severe earthquake levelled almost all of what was left of the old town, which is why so little that is old survives at street level below the ancient tombs. Rebuilt as a modest port and farming centre, Fethiye was transformed again from the 1980s by tourism, growing outwards along the bay and up the hills as yachting, charter flights to Dalaman and the resorts at Ölüdeniz and Hisarönü arrived.

Fethiye is a Turkish town that has absorbed a large foreign presence without becoming a purely foreign resort. British residents in particular have settled in Hisarönü, Ovacık and the villages around Kayaköy in numbers large enough to shape the commercial life of those places, and German, Dutch and Russian residents are part of the same picture. The result is a bilingual commercial life on the coast and an entirely Turkish one a few streets inland.

The sea sets much of the culture. Boatbuilding survives around the harbour, where wooden gulets — broad-beamed schooners developed on this coast for sponge diving and cargo, now used for cruising — are still built and repaired. A gulet trip along this coast, known as a blue cruise, is a Turkish institution as much as a foreign one.

Inland the district keeps its village traditions: weekly markets that rotate between towns, and a strong culture of breakfast and of tea. The abandoned town of Kayaköy has become a place of reflection on the population exchange, visited by Greeks and Turks alike and protected as a historic site. Paragliding has given the town a second identity: pilots launch from Mount Babadağ above Ölüdeniz and land on the beach, and the sky there is rarely empty in summer.

The district of Fethiye has about 178,000 residents and is one of the largest districts of Muğla province. The population swells enormously between May and October, and shrinks again when the charter flights stop; a proportion of foreign residents stay all year, and many Turkish seasonal workers come from inland provinces for the summer.

Tourism is the main employer, but it is not the whole economy. The plain behind the town grows citrus, pomegranates, olives and tomatoes, much of it under glass; beekeeping in the pine forests produces the region's pine honey; and fishing and boatbuilding continue at the harbour. Property development and construction, much of it aimed at foreign buyers and Istanbul second-home owners, are a large part of local business and a source of constant debate.

Life runs to the season. In summer the town works seven days a week, the promenade fills after dark and the roads to the beaches are jammed; in winter whole streets of Hisarönü shutter, the gulets are laid up and the pace becomes that of an ordinary provincial town. The weekly market remains the fixed point of the calendar for residents. Water supply, building on the hillsides, the pressure of traffic on a small centre, and the risk of wildfire in the surrounding forests are the recurring local concerns.

The kitchen is the Aegean and Mediterranean one: olive oil, lemon, herbs and vegetables, with fish at the centre. The ritual of the fish market is the town's own contribution — choosing sea bass, bream, red mullet, calamari or prawns at a stall, then handing them to one of the surrounding restaurants to be grilled or fried while mezes arrive at the table. Rakı, the aniseed spirit drunk with water and ice, is the accompaniment, and a meze spread may include samphire in olive oil, aubergine salad, stuffed vine leaves and yoghurt with garlic.

Mountain and village cooking balances the seafood. Tandır or testi kebab, lamb cooked slowly in a sealed clay pot and broken open at the table, is a speciality of the Kayaköy restaurants; gözleme, thin dough folded over cheese, potato or wild greens and cooked on a convex griddle, is made at roadside stalls; and köfte, pide and lahmacun are everywhere. Muğla province is known for çökertme kebabı, strips of marinated veal over thin fried potatoes with garlic yoghurt.

The surrounding land supplies the rest: citrus from the plain, pomegranates and figs, almonds, olives pressed nearby, and pine honey collected from the forest, a dark honey made by bees from the secretions of a scale insect on pine sap rather than from flowers; Muğla province accounts for most of Turkey's production, and Turkey for almost all of the world's. Breakfast is generous and long — cheeses, olives, eggs, tomatoes, honey and clotted kaymak — and tea is drunk all day in small tulip glasses, with Turkish coffee after meals.