İzmir is the modern city built over ancient Smyrna, and the things to do in İzmir city start at Konak Square: the Clock Tower stands there at the mouth of the Kemeraltı market, the Roman agora lies on the northern slope of Kadifekale, and Alsancak, with its seafront Kordon, is close enough to reach on foot. Pergamon, at Bergama, lies about 103 kilometres to the north; Urla and Çeşme share the peninsula named after them, with Alaçatı in the Çeşme district; and Selçuk holds Ephesus. Below, the sights are grouped by area, and each has its own guide on this site with the visiting details.
İzmir city centre: Konak Square and Kemeraltı
The Clock Tower is the city's emblem. It went up in 1901 for the twenty-fifth anniversary of Sultan Abdülhamid II's accession, to a design by the French architect Raymond Charles Péré, and rises twenty-five metres over four storeys. Just below the clock faces, the sultan's monogram and the Ottoman arms were chiselled off after the republic and replaced with a crescent and star.
Kemeraltı, the historic market, runs from Mezarlıkbaşı to Konak Square. Its main street, Anafartalar Caddesi, bends in a long arc because it once traced the shore of an inner harbour that later silted up, and the name, "under the arch", recalls lanes that stayed roofed until recent years. Look for ceramics, tiles, woodwork, tombak metalware, carpets, kilims and leather. Inside it, the Abacıoğlu Han of the early eighteenth century keeps shops around a two-storey courtyard; its restoration by the Konak municipality in 2005–2007 later won the Philippe Rotthier Prize. The Kestanepazarı Mosque, built in the seventeenth century, stands on a base of shops, with a porch of three domes.
The Agora and the older Smyrna
The Agora was the state square of Smyrna after the city moved to Pagos, today's Kadifekale, in the fourth century BC. Its founding is Hellenistic, but most of what you see belongs to the rebuilding after the earthquake of AD 178, which Marcus Aurelius supported. The highlight is the northern basilica, 165 by 28 metres overall, which the provincial directorate calls the largest Roman basilica known. Walk through its basement, where cross vaults survive at both ends and vaulted shops line the northern face, and then through the arched basement of the west stoa.
The first Smyrna lies on the mound at Bayraklı, an Aeolian foundation of the eleventh century BC whose temple the Culture Portal calls the oldest Hellenic temple found in Anatolia. The same portal admits the mound is not an attractive site for tourists; it suits those already drawn to early Greek cities.
Alsancak and the Kordon
Alsancak is where İzmir goes out. The First Kordon runs along its seafront with cafés, fish restaurants, running and cycling tracks, the sea breeze locals call the imbat, and sunsets the city has written songs about; behind it are Greek houses, churches, synagogues and the Pasaport pier. Alsancak station, opened in 1858, began the first railway, laid to bring the harvest of the plain between Aydın and İzmir to the harbour.
On the Kordon itself, the İzmir Atatürk Museum occupies a neoclassical house of 1880 that the municipality gave to Atatürk in 1926; he stayed in it on his visits of 1930 to 1934, and it became a museum in 1941. In the old Alsancak tobacco factory, Müze İzmir opened in building number 4 in 2023, with about 6,000 objects over three floors, archaeology below and ethnography at the top, grouped by theme rather than by date.
The Archaeological Museum and the Balçova springs
The İzmir Archaeological Museum, in Bahribaba Park at Konak since 1984, shows finds from Bayraklı, Ephesus, Pergamon, Miletos, Klazomenai, Teos and Iasos. Look for the bronze running athlete and the bust of Hygieia, then cross to the İzmir Ethnography Museum in the older building opposite. At Balçova, the hot springs known as the Baths of Agamemnon have water reaching 63 °C, with hot baths and mud baths.
Selçuk and Ephesus, in brief
Ephesus, the Temple of Artemis, the Ephesus Museum and the House of the Virgin Mary all lie in the Selçuk district, and we cover them in a separate post, "Ephesus: what to see at the ancient city and around Selçuk". In short, Ephesus was once the capital of Asia Minor in politics, trade and culture, and what stands is a marble city: the terrace houses, the Temple of Hadrian, the Library of Celsus and the great theatre. Eight kilometres east of Selçuk, the hill village of Şirince keeps some 200 houses from its Rum period, set in rows on the slope, and is known for fruit wines and village produce.
Bergama: Pergamon and the Asklepion
Bergama, İzmir's largest district by area, grows on the same slope as ancient Pergamon, and UNESCO inscribed the whole setting in 2014 as the Pergamon and its Multi-Layered Cultural Landscape. The city peaked under the Attalid kings between 280 and 133 BC. On the acropolis, the theatre is cut very steeply into the hill for ten thousand people, and the library under Eumenes II held 200,000 book rolls. The Altar of Zeus, built for the victory over the Galatians, went to Prussia in 1870 and is displayed in Berlin; the Bergama Museum, opened in 1936, keeps a model of it.
The Asklepion, about three kilometres from the acropolis, was a sanctuary where the sick came to be healed. Patients approached by the Via Tecta, a roofed sacred road a kilometre long, and slept in the sanctuary hoping for a cure in a dream; the orator Aelius Aristides wrote down the regime of water, mud, fasting and music. Most of what stands is Roman work of the second century AD: the colonnaded court, a theatre for 3,500, and a round temple of Asklepios whose model was the Pantheon in Rome. In the lower town, the brick Red Courtyard was probably dedicated to Serapis and Isis and later served as a church.
Urla, Çeşme and Alaçatı, and Teos at Sığacık
Klazomenai, at Urla on the northern coast of the Urla-Çeşme peninsula, belonged to the twelve Ionian cities; its site at Limantepe had people living there from around 4000 BC. In the Bademler arts village, the Sabiha Tansuğ Ethnography Museum shows the collection one woman gathered over about fifty years; her picture in an Ankara bridal headdress appeared on the 50-kuruş coin in circulation from 1971 to 1979.
Çeşme Castle was built by Bayezid II in 1508 to watch over the harbour, and the town is probably named after the fountains, çeşme in Turkish, where sailors filled up with water. The Çeşme Museum, set up inside the castle in 1965, shows finds from rescue digs at Erythrae, the ancient city to which Çeşme served as a landing. Alaçatı is the place for wind sports: a steady wind and a sandy sea floor that stays shallow for 200 to 300 metres out bring surfers from Türkiye and abroad. Teos, at Sığacık five kilometres from Seferihisar, was another of the Ionian cities; its temple of Dionysos, the work of Hermogenes of Priene, is according to the ministry the largest raised to that god in Anatolia.
Foça and Karaburun
Foça, ancient Phokaia, takes its name from the seals around its islands and keeps the Mediterranean monk seal as its emblem. It has two fortifications: the Ottoman outer castle of 1678 on Kale Burnu, and the older town walls, where the Beşkapılar boathouse now serves as an open-air theatre. Karaburun, on the peninsula that carries its name, about 102 kilometres and an hour and a half by car from İzmir, is one of the least built-up parts of the coast: coves, villages, diving and walking rather than hotels.
Klaros, Metropolis and Birgi
Klaros, at Ahmetbeyli, was an oracle rather than a city. Its temple of Apollo is, by the ministry's account, the only Doric temple built in Ionia, and the eight-metre cult statues of Leto, Artemis and Apollo were found in place. Metropolis, the city of the mother goddess, stands on a hill 45 kilometres east of İzmir on the Torbalı plain. At Birgi, in the Ödemiş district, the Çakırağa Mansion is a three-storey wooden house with painted walls and ceilings; the story goes that a merchant married to a woman from İzmir and another from İstanbul had each wife's home city painted on the wall of her room, so that neither would miss it.
