There is no single building called Foça Kalesi: the town has two sets of fortification, and it is worth knowing which is which before you go looking.
The Dış Kale, the outer castle, also called the Genoese castle, stands on Kale Burnu at the southwest of Foça. The Ottomans built it in 1678 at a strategic point, as a strait-blocker guarding the approach. It sits on a headland, cut off from the mainland on the east by a large defensive ditch, and inside are the remains of a Turkish bath. Underwater archaeological survey found stone balls on the sea bed off the castle, which are thought to have been thrown at enemy ships from here by catapult.
The older circuit is the town wall with the structure known as Beşkapılar, the five gates. Michael Palaiologos granted this castle to the Genoese Manuel Zaccaria in 1275, and the Genoese repaired its walls over the years that followed. After Phokaia was taken into Ottoman territory in 1455 the walls were repaired again and furnished with towers, of which nine can still be made out. Beşkapılar itself is the boathouse section of the Ottoman castle; an inscription there records a repair in 1538 and 1539, in the reign of Süleyman the Magnificent, and the building was restored again in 1983 and 1994. The best preserved stretches of the walls that ring the town are on the peninsula, where Byzantine, Genoese and Ottoman repairs sit on top of one another.
One part of the fortifications has a use beyond sightseeing: the provincial directorate's page says the castle's boathouse serves as an open-air theatre. The name of the town is worth knowing while you look at the sea it guards — Foça, Phokaia, is named for the seals that live around the islands off it, and the town still takes the Mediterranean monk seal as its emblem, though the directorate notes the older emblem of the people of Phokaia was the cockerel, carved in wood and set in their assemblies, their temples and on the prows of their ships.
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).
Getting there
- Access
- From İzmir, take the İZBAN train to Hatundere station, then an ESHOT bus between Hatundere and Foça.
