Çeşme Kalesi was built in 1508, in the Ottoman period, by Bayezid II, and the district governorate calls it the most important historic building in Çeşme. It looks out over the harbour, which is what it was there for.
The town beneath it is older than the castle by a long way. Known in antiquity as Cyssus, it served as the Ildır landing of Erythrai, one of the twelve Ionian cities founded on the western coast of Anatolia around 1000 BC. Its modern name is thought to come from the fountains — çeşme — where sailors took on water, and the town still has a number of them: three from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, known as the Anonymous, the Kaymakam and the Molla fountains, and a water balance tower in the cemetery quarter that has survived intact.
The region passed from Byzantium to the Turks under Çaka Bey in 1081. Çaka Bey, father-in-law of Kılıç Arslan I, took the Clazomenae peninsula in the Seljuk period and settled Oğuz Turks in the area two kilometres south of Çeşme now known as Çeşme Köyü, building a mosque and houses for them. He was the first Turkish commander to put out into the Aegean: with the light fleet he had built at İzmir in 1085 he raided the Aegean islands and fought successfully against Byzantine naval power.
When to go
- Climate
- Across İzmir as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from 8.9 °C in January to 28 °C in July; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in April, May, September and October; rainfall is heaviest in December (146 mm) and lightest in July (4 mm). Long-term means for 1938-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
Visiting hours
- Hours
- 08:30 - 21:00
