Bodrum sits on top of Halikarnassos, one of the better-known cities of antiquity. The region around it was called Caria, covering what is now the whole of Muğla province and part of Aydın; ancient writers put its western boundary at the Menderes and its eastern one at the Dalaman stream. Its old inhabitants were the Carians and the Leleges, and Homer counts the Carians among the native peoples of Anatolia, defending it alongside the Trojans.
Where the name Halikarnassos came from is not settled. Herodotos, who was born in the city, and the geographer Strabon both credit Dorian Greek settlers with founding it — incomers from Troizen in the western Peloponnese, arriving among a population of Carians and Leleges. The first settlement was on the rise where the castle now stands, and the palace of the satrap Maussollos was later built on the same ground. The city belonged to the league of six Dorian cities.
At the beginning of the sixth century BC Caria was under Lydian rule; when Cyrus of Persia took Sardis, the cities of western Anatolia passed to the Persians, Halikarnassos among them. The Persians governed through local dynasties, and Caria went to the Hekatomnids of Mylasa. On Hekatomnos's death his son Maussollos became satrap and moved the capital from Mylasa to Halikarnassos around 367 BC.
The city was easy to defend and well placed for trade and shipping, and it grew quickly. Maussollos forced the people of six of the eight Lelegian towns nearby to move into it, and brought in the sculptors and architects of his day to rebuild it. The Maussolleion, counted among the seven wonders of the ancient world, the theatre — one of the earliest in Anatolia — and the walls all belong to this period. He ruled Caria for twenty-four years; when he died in 353 BC his wife Artemisia II held power for two more.
Alexander took the city in the spring of 334 BC, early in his eastern campaign. Afterwards it appears as a small town in the Roman province of Asia, attacked by the pirate Verres in 80 BC and described as poor by 60 BC. Building work resumed under Augustus, and the temple of Mars east of the theatre dates from then.
The castle that dominates Bodrum today belongs to a much later chapter. The city passed to the Turks in the last quarter of the eleventh century, returned to Byzantine hands during the First Crusade, and was taken again in the mid-thirteenth century by the sea gazis of the Menteşe beylik, who built a fortress here. After the Ottoman defeat at Ankara in 1402 the Knights of St John asked Mehmed Çelebi for ground on the Anatolian coast to replace their ruined castle at İzmir; they took the town, called it Mesy, and began their own castle on the Dorian acropolis where the Turkish fortress stood.
What is left of the ancient city to look for: the theatre, stretches of the city wall with the Myndos Gate, the Maussolleion, the necropolis where excavation continues, a Roman villa, the temple of Mars, and Bodrum Castle itself.
When to go
- Climate
- Across Muğla as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from 10.8 °C in January to 27.6 °C in August; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in April, May, June, September, October and November; rainfall is heaviest in December (207 mm) and lightest in August (4 mm). Long-term means for 2001-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
