The town's name has changed with every ruler. The first writer to mention Korakesion is Scylax, a geographer of the 4th century BC, when the region lay under the Persians who had overrun much of Anatolia. Strabo wrote about it later, and so did travellers who passed through — Piri Reis, Ibn Battuta, Evliya Çelebi. Under Byzantium it was called Kalonoros.
About the earliest periods and the Byzantine centuries the municipality's own account admits there is not much to go on. What is clear is that from the 7th century AD, during the Arab raids, defending the town mattered more than anything else and castle building took priority — which is why so many of the castles and churches around Alanya date to the 6th and 7th centuries.
The decisive year is 1221. Alaaddin Keykubad I of the Anatolian Seljuks defeated Kyr Vart, the Christian lord holding the castle, took it, and had a palace built there for himself. The Seljuks used Alanya as a second capital and a winter seat alongside Konya, and built accordingly. The sultan renamed the city Alaiye after himself; the modern name comes from Atatürk, who visited in 1935.
What followed was decline and sale. The Mongol attacks of 1243 and the Mamluk entry into Anatolia in 1277 wore the Seljuks down, and when their state broke apart in 1300 the Karamanids sold the district to the Mamluk sultan for five thousand gold pieces. Mehmed II brought it inside Ottoman territory in 1471. Alanya was attached with Tarsus to the province of Cyprus in 1571, became a sancak of Konya province in 1864, and passed to Antalya in 1868. The castle, the Red Tower, the shipyard and the caves each have their own page below.
