Kuşadası takes its name from the small rock in its harbour, Güvercinada or Pigeon Island, which a castle wall circles from end to end and which the town uses as its emblem; a breakwater has tied it to the shore since 1957. Close to the quay stand a caravanserai and a domed mosque that went up together under Öküz Mehmet Paşa in the seventeenth century, and on a mound in the district Kadıkalesi looks down on the old harbour of Anaia. South of the town the Dilek peninsula and the delta of the Büyük Menderes form a national park. Inland lies Ephesus, and further south the Ionian city of Priene, the silted-up port of Miletus, the oracle of Apollo at Didyma and Lake Bafa.
Pigeon Island and its castle
The island is a natural cone of rock, steep on three sides, and its wall, about three metres high, was built hard against that slope, so the rock serves both as foundation and as defence. The island is an open-air museum on the Ministry of Culture and Tourism's list: you enter through a wooden gateway and follow wooden walkways between the trees and the walls. In 2020 UNESCO put the castle on its Tentative List, in a file covering the walled settlements of the Genoese trade route between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.
The Genoese reached Kuşadası at the end of the thirteenth century or early in the fourteenth. Under the Ottomans the island also served as a lookout against pirates, which is why it is known as the Pirate Castle too. Barbaros Hayreddin Pasha, made the first governor-general of the White Sea Islands in 1533, built the inner castle and the town armoury, and Öküz Mehmed Pasha, who received Kuşadası as his property in 1613, had the castle repaired. The subaşı İlyas Ağa repaired the walls in 1826 and 1827, during the Greek uprising, there was more strengthening in 1834, and further work followed in 2013.
Early travellers and a surviving engraving show just one fortification on the island, the square tower, 15.7 by 17.35 metres outside. Its stepped base is really a half-buried vaulted cistern, and twenty-two steps in its north-east corner climb to the roof. The castle gate, on the south side and reached by steps from the east, has a round arch between two towers, one five-sided and one cylindrical, with a marble inscription set into the wall beside the tower door.
By the quay: the caravanserai and the Kaleiçi Mosque
The grand vizier Öküz Mehmet Paşa built his caravanserai near the quay in 1618, and it still looks like a small fortress: thick, high walls of rubble and reused ancient blocks crowned with pointed, triangular battlements, around a wide rectangular courtyard ringed by two storeys of arcades. The marble doorway is on the north side. It has been restored several times and works today as a hotel.
The Kaleiçi Mosque, also called the Öküz Mehmet Paşa Mosque, carries no inscription; its endowment deed is what dates it to the seventeenth century, alongside the caravanserai. A single large dome covers the square hall, sixteen round-arched windows ring the drum, and oil-painted columns stand between them. Look closely at the main door, Ottoman woodwork in interlocking geometric panels with small pieces of mother-of-pearl set into it. The timber-framed porch on the north was added in 1830, and slender colonnettes and a pediment give the mihrab a baroque frame. The town also keeps a small museum of minerals and fossils from Türkiye and abroad, its oldest piece a mineral rock two billion years old.
Kadıkalesi and the harbour of Anaia
Kadıkalesi stands on a mound above the harbour of Anaia, a coastal town of antiquity and the Middle Ages, a position that let it control the strait towards Samos, once an important route for Aegean trade. Excavation since 2001 inside a 13th-century castle raised to guard the harbour has found layers reaching back five thousand years, among them an early Christian church, probably over a temple on the acropolis, that became a bishop's seat soon after 1200. A Hittite figurine from the mound is in the Aydın Archaeological Museum.
The Dilek peninsula, the Zeus Cave and Davutlar
The Dilek peninsula, protected in 1966, and the Büyük Menderes delta, added in 1994, together make a national park of 27,598 hectares across the Kuşadası, Söke and Didim districts. The way in is from Millî Park Caddesi in Güzelçamlı, and in summer this is where local people go for the sea. Inside are beaches and cliffs, lagoons, mud flats that surface when the water drops, wide shallow bays, and under water Posidonia beds, reefs and caves. The peninsula carries some of Türkiye's finest maquis, with Black Sea plants on its northern slopes, and the delta is one of the Aegean's key stops for migrating birds.
A hundred to a hundred and fifty metres from the park entrance at Güzelçamlı, at the foot of the hill, the Zeus Cave holds a spring that has filled small, very deep pools; where the water comes from is not known exactly, and the ancient city of Panionion stands higher up the same hill. At Davutlar, 17 km from Kuşadası, thermal water rises in the middle of the small town, and the provincial directorate counts its spa, with indoor and outdoor thermal pools, among the two most important in Aydın.
Ephesus and Pamucak
Ephesus, once Asia Minor's capital in politics, trade and culture, is the reason many people come to Kuşadası at all. The district governorate puts its peak population at around 250,000 and calls it Anatolia's largest ancient city by the area you can walk. From the Magnesia Gate the route runs down Curetes Street past the Temple of Hadrian and the terrace houses to the Library of Celsus and the great theatre, and on Ayasuluk Hill nearby people were living from around 6000 BC. A separate post covers the city in detail. On the road towards Kuşadası, 8 kilometres from the ruins, Pamucak has a long, open sand beach that still looks unspoilt, on a stretch of coast declared a tourism centre.
Priene, Miletus and Didyma
From Davutlar, Priene and Miletus are within a day's reach, as are Ephesus and the national park. Priene sits on a steep rock at 370 metres on Samsun mountain's southern slope, fifteen kilometres south-west of Söke, a site both easy to defend and visible from far around. Like Miletos it belonged to the Ionian League, and the ancient sources first mention it in the mid-seventh century BC. Its theatre of 350 BC held five thousand people, and the temple of Athena takes the most commanding point, where a gold and ivory statue of the goddess once stood; only part of its altar survives.
Miletus was a harbour city until the Büyük Menderes filled its bay with silt. The Persian invasion of 494 BC emptied it, the Hellenistic city grew up around the Lion Harbour and the theatre, and Rome added the Faustina and Capito baths, a harbour gate, a stadium and the west agora. It became a bishopric in the fifth century, shrank to the theatre and the castle, and under Byzantium was called Palatia. Near Balat, the Miletus Museum, in a new building on the old site since 2011, shows finds from Miletus, Didyma and Priene indoors and large marble pieces, sarcophagi and inscriptions in its garden; opposite is the Park of Philosophers, given to the thinkers the city produced.
Didyma, at Didim, was never a city but the sanctuary of an oracle of Apollo, and the ministry ranks its temple as the third largest Ionic temple of the ancient world and one of the best preserved. A double row of columns surrounds it, but the heart of it is unusual: a courtyard open to the sky and left unpaved, which held the sacred spring and a small temple, the naiskos, because the building was shaped around the work of the oracle. The foundations in that court belong to an older, sixth-century BC temple, destroyed by the Persians early in the fifth. A Medusa guards the temple.
Lake Bafa
Lake Bafa was once part of the Aegean, the gulf of Latmos, until silt from the Büyük Menderes closed it off; today it is a freshwater lake of about sixty square kilometres, some seventeen kilometres from the river mouth. The Söke–Milas road follows its southern shore, so you see it from the car, and that side has camping grounds and tourist facilities. The ruins of Herakleia and Pyrrha stand on the shore, small islands such as Hayaletada and İkizada carry the remains of old buildings, and the shallow western shore is where migrating birds stop and breed in spring and autumn. With less river water reaching it, and that water polluted, the lake has lost oxygen and fish have died by the hundreds of thousands.
