Foça was Phokaia, and the name comes from the seal — phoke in old Greek. It was one of the twelve Ionian cities and lay in the region of Aiolis. How it was founded is disputed, and the district governorship's own account sets out the competing versions rather than choosing between them.
The ancient writers said that people from Phokis in central Greece, under the Athenian commanders Phligones and Damos, founded Phokaia on this site with the permission of Kyme, the city near modern Aliağa that held the area. Pausanias gave a different account: that Phokaia was founded by settlers from Teos and Erythrai. Earlier excavations pointed to a third version — that the first inhabitants were Aiolians, that they founded the city in the 11th century BC, and that Ionians lived here from the end of the 9th.
Recent digging pushed all of that back. The oldest known history of Phokaia now reaches to the Early Bronze Age, the third millennium BC. The city was first founded on the southern slopes, and its local people are understood to have been in close contact with the Mycenaeans — the Achaeans arriving from Greece — during the second half of the second millennium BC. The Aiolians came in the 11th century and the Ionians after them, and the local population merged with both.
From the 7th century BC the city rose quickly, and what it rose on was seafaring. Herodotos, the father of history, records that the Phokaians became great sailors: using fast boats of fifty oars that could carry five hundred, they were the first Greeks to make long sea voyages, reaching the Adriatic, Etruria, Iberia and Tartessos. The ancient theatre, the rock tombs, the sea walls and the islands offshore each have their own page below.
