İzmir

The city began as Old Smyrna at Bayraklı, on a small peninsula at the head of the bay, settled in the Bronze Age and rebuilt by Aeolian and then Ionian Greeks; it claimed Homer as its own. Lydians destroyed it in the 7th century BC, and it was refounded on the slopes of Mount Pagos, today's Kadifekale, in the wake of Alexander's conquest — a new, planned city that became one of the wealthiest of the Roman province of Asia. An earthquake levelled it in 178 AD and the emperor Marcus Aurelius paid for its rebuilding, which is when the surviving agora took its present form.

After Byzantine centuries the city was contested between Turkish principalities, the Knights of St John, who held the harbour castle, and Timur, whose army sacked it in 1402. Ottoman rule was settled from the 1420s, and from the 17th century Smyrna grew into the empire's great Aegean port, exporting figs, raisins, cotton and tobacco through Greek, Armenian, Jewish, Levantine and Turkish merchant houses. Railways built from the 1850s by British and French companies pushed its trade deep into Anatolia, and the mixture of peoples earned it the nickname gâvur İzmir, "infidel İzmir", in the conservative interior.

That world ended in 1922. Greek forces had landed in May 1919 and advanced into Anatolia; the Turkish counter-offensive reached the coast in September 1922, and days after Turkish troops entered the city a fire destroyed its Greek and Armenian quarters. The Greek and Armenian population left, Muslim refugees arrived, and the republic rebuilt the burnt district as Kültürpark and a grid of boulevards. Industry, the port and migration from inland Anatolia then made it Turkey's third city.

İzmir thinks of itself as the most European and most relaxed of Turkey's big cities, and it says so often. It votes consistently for the secular opposition, its social life is conducted in the open on the Kordon and in the cafés of Alsancak, and drinking rakı by the sea with a table of meze is treated as a civic institution rather than a vice. Women's visibility in public life, mixed nightlife and a certain irreverence towards authority are all part of the self-image.

The city's cultural memory is layered. Levantine mansions in Bornova and Buca, the stepped streets and synagogues of the old Jewish quarter around Karataş, the churches of the Catholic and Orthodox communities and the hans of Kemeraltı all survive from the cosmopolitan port, and the Jewish community — one of the oldest in Turkey — still maintains historic synagogues in the bazaar district. The catastrophe of 1922 remains the central date in the city's story, commemorated every 9 September.

Music and sport carry the rest. The Ahmed Adnan Saygun Arts Centre hosts the symphony orchestra and the summer festival, and the zeybek, the slow, proud dance of the Aegean hills, is danced at weddings and official ceremonies alike. Football loyalties are strong and local, and the sea is part of daily identity: swimming, rowing and sailing clubs line the bay, and residents measure their city by how much of it faces the water.

About 4.5 million people live in İzmir province, most of them in the continuous city that wraps around the bay, which makes it Turkey's third-largest urban area. The bay divides life into two shores linked by ferry: Konak, Alsancak and the southern districts on one side, Karşıyaka and Bostanlı on the other, with Bornova and Buca spreading inland to the east.

The economy rests on the port, one of the country's busiest, and on the industrial zones around it producing food, textiles, chemicals and vehicles parts, together with agriculture in the surrounding province — figs, olives, grapes, cotton and tobacco — and a steady tourist trade to the coast and the ancient sites. Several large universities give the city a big student population. Wages are lower than Istanbul's, and so are rents, though both have risen sharply.

Daily rhythms are shaped by heat and water. Summer afternoons are slow, and evenings belong to the promenade, where families, runners, cyclists and tea sellers fill the grass strip until late. Commuting is done by train, metro and ferry as much as by car. Local concerns include earthquake safety after the damage of 2020, the cost of housing, water supply in dry years and the condition of the bay, which has been the subject of long-running clean-up efforts.

İzmir's kitchen is the lightest in Turkey, built on olive oil, vegetables and fish. Zeytinyağlılar — artichokes, broad beans, green beans, stuffed vine leaves — are cooked slowly and eaten cool, wild greens gathered in the hills are dressed with lemon, and grilled fish, octopus and samphire fill the meze table at the seafront meyhane taverns, always with rakı.

Breakfast and street food are where the city is most itself. Boyoz, a flaky pastry of Sephardic origin, is eaten with a hard-boiled egg at bakery counters; gevrek is İzmir's name for the sesame bread ring the rest of the country calls simit; kumru, a toasted sandwich of sucuk sausage and cheese, appeared here in the mid-20th century; and söğüş, sliced offal wrapped in flatbread with tomato, onion and herbs, is a bazaar speciality. Midye dolma, mussels stuffed with spiced rice, are sold from trays along the promenade.

Cooked dishes include İzmir köfte, baked meatballs with potatoes and tomato sauce, and the tripe soups sold late at night near the bazaar. Sweets run to şambali, a syrup-soaked semolina cake, and lokma, small fried dough balls distributed in the street as alms. The province supplies dried figs from the Menderes valley, sultanas from Manisa and olive oil from the coast, and the vineyards around Urla have made the city a centre of the country's wine revival. Coffee is roasted and ground in Kemeraltı and drunk in the courtyards of its old hans.