The Aegean

The Aegean coast was the heart of the ancient Greek east. Ionian settlers founded Ephesus, Miletus and Priene and took over Aeolian Smyrna, the city that became İzmir, and Miletus produced the first Greek philosophers. Inland, the Lydian kingdom ruled from Sardis, near today's Manisa, where Croesus's predecessors are credited with striking the first coins, before the Persians took it in the 6th century BC. Halicarnassus, now Bodrum, was the birthplace of Herodotus and site of the Mausoleum, one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world. Pergamon flourished as a Hellenistic kingdom until its last king left it to Rome in 133 BC.

Under Rome, Ephesus became the capital of the province of Asia and one of the leading cities of the empire, and Paul preached there; Hierapolis grew rich as a spa above the Pamukkale springs. After Byzantine rule, Turkish principalities took over in the 13th and 14th centuries — the Aydınids around Birgi and Selçuk, the Menteşe in the south, the Germiyanids at Kütahya — before the Ottomans absorbed them all. The Knights Hospitaller held Bodrum's castle until 1523.

The modern age began violently. Greek forces landed at Smyrna in 1919 and pushed inland; the Turkish counter-offensive of August 1922 opened near Afyonkarahisar, and in September Turkish troops entered İzmir, where a great fire destroyed much of the city. The population exchange of 1923 emptied the Greek villages of the coast, Kayaköy among them. From the 1980s tourism transformed fishing villages such as Bodrum, Marmaris and Fethiye.

Aegean people have a reputation as the most relaxed and secular in Turkey, and İzmir, with its seafront promenade and evening drinks, is the political opposite of the conservative interior — a city that votes consistently for the opposition. The region's folk emblem is the zeybek, a slow, proud dance named after the zeybeks, bands led by chiefs called efe, irregular fighters of the hills who became local folk heroes.

Festivals mix the old and the odd. Manisa's Mesir Macunu festival, when a spiced paste believed to have healing powers is thrown to crowds from the Sultan Mosque, is on UNESCO's intangible heritage list. Camel wrestling, in which two bull camels push and tussle for a female, is staged around Selçuk and the Aydın countryside in winter, with the Selçuk festival each January the best known. Yörük nomad traditions of tent-weaving and pastoralism survive in the hills of Muğla.

Crafts are regional specialities: blue-painted ceramics and tiles from Kütahya, the historic carpets of Uşak and the rugs of Milas, marble from Afyonkarahisar, and textiles from Denizli's looms. The coast also has large foreign communities — British, German and other retirees around Fethiye, Didim and Bodrum — and summer brings a stream of Istanbul residents to second homes on the peninsulas.

İzmir is Turkey's third-largest city, with around four and a half million people in its province, a busy port and a large industrial belt. The other main centres are Manisa, Denizli, Aydın, Muğla's coastal towns, and the inland cities of Afyonkarahisar, Kütahya and Uşak, each with a few hundred thousand people.

The economy is unusually varied. Manisa's industrial zone makes televisions and white goods, Denizli is a textile town, and Afyonkarahisar quarries marble. Agriculture is rich: figs and olives in the Aydın valley of the Büyük Menderes, sultana grapes around Manisa, cotton on the plains, and tobacco and olive oil across the region. Tourism dominates Muğla and parts of İzmir and Aydın, and the thermal waters of Afyonkarahisar and Pamukkale support spa hotels.

Life on the coast runs to the tourist season: hotels, boat crews and restaurants work seven days a week from May to October, and many resort towns empty in winter. Coastal land prices, rising rents in İzmir and the pressure of new building on the peninsulas are local issues, as are summer wildfires and drought.

The Aegean kitchen is Turkey's lightest: vegetables cooked slowly in olive oil and eaten cool (zeytinyağlılar), wild greens and herbs gathered from the hills and dressed with lemon, artichokes, broad beans, and fish and octopus grilled simply. Alaçatı holds a herb festival each spring, and a meze table of samphire, sea bass and rakı is the classic Aegean evening.

İzmir has its own street food: boyoz, a flaky pastry with roots in the city's Sephardic Jewish community, eaten with a hard-boiled egg for breakfast; gevrek, İzmir's name for the sesame bread ring; and kumru, a toasted sandwich of sausage and cheese from Çeşme. Bodrum and Muğla are known for çökertme kebabı, strips of meat over fried potato sticks with yoghurt, and for tarhana soup made from dried fermented yoghurt and grain.

Inland, Afyonkarahisar is famous for its kaymak, a thick clotted cream, eaten with honey or on sweets, and for its sucuk sausage and lokum. Aydın's dried figs and the sultana raisins of Manisa are exported worldwide. The region is also Turkey's leading wine country, with vineyards around Urla near İzmir, the Çal district of Denizli and the Manisa plain.

İzmir is a working city with a fine setting: the Kordon promenade, the clock tower in Konak Square, the Kemeraltı bazaar and the Asansör, a lift up the cliff of an old Jewish quarter. West of the city, the Çeşme peninsula has beaches, the windmills and stone houses of Alaçatı, and the windsurfing bays around it; north, Pergamon's acropolis rises above Bergama, and east the Temple of Artemis and a large synagogue stand at Sardis.

Selçuk is the base for Ephesus, a UNESCO World Heritage Site: the Library of Celsus, the Great Theatre, the marble Curetes Street and the terrace houses with their frescoes, plus the single standing column of the Temple of Artemis, the Basilica of St John and the House of the Virgin Mary on the hill above. The hill village of Şirince makes wine. Further south in Aydın province are Priene, Miletus and the Temple of Apollo at Didyma, while Aphrodisias, with its stadium and sculpture, lies inland.

Denizli province holds Pamukkale's white travertine terraces and the ruins of Hierapolis above them, together a UNESCO World Heritage Site, with its antique pool of warm spring water. The Aegean coast of Muğla runs from Bodrum, with its castle, harbour and whitewashed houses, to Marmaris and the Datça peninsula with ancient Knidos at its tip. Beyond Dalyan's Lycian rock tombs and the turtle beach at İztuzu, Fethiye has the lagoon of Ölüdeniz, paragliding from Babadağ, the ghost village of Kayaköy and the western start of the Lycian Way. In the interior, Kütahya has the Temple of Zeus at Aizanoi and Afyonkarahisar its fortress rock and the Phrygian Valley.