Alanya grew up around a rocky peninsula that rises some 250 metres out of the sea, and the castle on top, rebuilt by the Seljuk sultan Alaeddin Keykubad I in the thirteenth century, still dominates the town. In town are the Alanya Museum and the house where Atatürk stayed in 1935, its front turned to the castle. On either side of the peninsula sandy beaches run away, Kleopatra to the west and the long east shore beyond Keykubat beach. Inland, Dim Cave opens on the slope of Cebireis mountain, and along the coast towards Gazipaşa stand two ancient cities, Syedra on its hill and Iotape on its headland.
Alanya Castle
The place began as Korakesion in the second century BC, and the first fortress on the peninsula is Hellenistic. Rome, harassed by the pirates of the eastern Mediterranean, seized it in 64 and 65 BC. Most of what you walk through today, though, is Seljuk: Alaeddin Keykubad I won the town in 1220 and 1221 and ordered it rebuilt. After that it passed to the Karamanids and the Mamluks and finally to Süleyman I.
The scale is the point. The walls run for 6.5 kilometres, with eighty-three towers and 140 bastions, and about twelve hundred cisterns were dug in the Middle Ages to give the walled town water, some of which still work. The line of the walls threads through Ehmedek and the inner castle, then Adam Atacağı, the Cilvarda point, Arap Evliyası and the Esat bastion, and down past the arsenal and the dockyard to finish at the Red Tower. At the top is the inner castle, where Alaeddin Keykubad built his palace, now arranged as a museum. The castle is still lived in and you can drive up, ride the cable car, or walk to the inner castle in about an hour.
The museum and the Atatürk House
Alanya Museum dates from 1967, when it opened with Bronze Age, Urartian, Phrygian and Lydian pieces sent from Ankara's Museum of Anatolian Civilisations; finds from local excavations have filled it since. Look for the Phoenician inscription from Cebelireis Dağı, of the seventh century BC and among the oldest finds from around Alanya, and above all for the bronze Herakles of the second century AD, which has a room to itself. The archaeology rooms run from Archaic to Byzantine, with ash chests, coins and Seljuk and Ottoman work, and the ethnography section has Yörük kilims, saddlebags, embroidery, jewellery and writing sets, plus the living room of an old Alanya house rebuilt inside. Roman, Byzantine and Islamic carved stones fill the garden.
On 18 February 1935 Atatürk arrived in Alanya and spent some time in a house in the Sekerhane quarter built by the timber merchant M. Tevfik Azakoglu; Rıfat Azakoglu later donated it to the Ministry of Culture, and after restoration it opened in 1987 as the Alanya Atatürk House. It is a three-storey konak in the local style, timber and masonry on the karniyarik plan, its rooms opening off a central sofa and its front turned towards the castle. Atatürk's waistcoat, a crested shirt, shoes and a telegram he addressed to the people of Alanya are on the entrance floor; upstairs, rooms are set out as a traditional Alanya home, with displays on local weddings, cooking and children's games, and cases of regional dress, embroidery, jewellery and weapons.
Dim Cave
Eleven kilometres east of Alanya, Dim Cave lies on the western slope of Cebireis mountain, with the Dim stream 232 metres below its car park in a valley shaded by plane trees and used for picnics. The cave is 410 metres long, horizontal and semi-dry, and 360 metres of it can be walked through four main chambers that are ten to fifteen metres wide and high. It holds steady at eighteen degrees all year, soda-straw stalactites are still forming where water drips, and in the last section there is a lake two metres deep spread over two hundred square metres. Outside, a terrace with a telescope looks over the Mediterranean, Alanya, its castle and the Taurus. On 24 October 2002 it joined the International Show Caves Association, and Turkish Wikipedia records it as the first show cave in Türkiye run by a private enterprise.
Syedra and Iotape
Syedra sits on a hilltop over the sea about twenty kilometres south-east of Alanya, at Seki village, where Pamphylia met Cilicia, and it is one of the few ruins on this coast set up for visitors. You come in through the monumental west gate and follow a timber walkway to a colonnaded street 250 metres long, the old social heart of the city, with niches in its northern wall and steps up to a heroon at its western end. To the east are the baths, with patches of mosaic floor, and the gymnasium beside them; inscriptions about the games held here date the city's best years to the second to fourth centuries AD. People had settled here by the ninth century BC, and the name Syedreon first appears on coins of Tiberius.
Iotape, or Aytap, stands at kilometre thirty-three of the Alanya–Gazipaşa road. It was named after Iotape, wife of Antiochos IV of Commagene, and minted its own coins from Trajan to Valerian. Its walled acropolis on a promontory looks like a fortress. Along the old harbour street, inscribed statue bases honour the city's generous citizens; in the bay to the east are a basilica, a small church attributed to Hagios Georgios Stratelates, and a bath with its water system, and on the seaward side a temple to Trajan survives only as its stylobate.
The beaches and İncekum
Kleopatra Plajı, on the western side of town, is about two kilometres of broad fine sand with a shallow sea, named for the story that Cleopatra bathed here. To the east, Doğu Plajı follows the Antalya-Mersin highway, starting with Keykubat beach and continuing for another 14 km, with beach facilities all the way. Ulaş Plajı lies 6 km west of the centre beside a roadside rest park, and the provincial directorate counts it among the finest in Antalya.
About 20 km west of Alanya, pine woods come down to the natural sand of İncekum, where there is space to pitch a tent. Also in Alanya district, İncekum Nature Park, declared on 8 February 2016, protects about 13,240 square metres of kamenitzas, shallow pans that carbonic-acid water has dissolved into the shoreline rock, and a third-century AD olive press found in the bay, around 1,800 years old. The hoopoe, turtle dove, little owl and Mediterranean tortoise are among the animals recorded under its stone pines, carobs and strawberry trees.
