Guide
Kaz Dağı — Mount Ida — stands at the centre of the Troas, the Biga peninsula, and what has gathered around it over thousands of years says how much it has mattered: settlement, climate, plant and animal life, myth, and the cultures built here. It is the sacred mountain of the legends.
It is ringed by important ancient settlements, Troy first among them, along with Adramytteion, Antandros, Assos, Lamponeia, Gargara, Kebren and Skepsis. In Bayramiç the Hadimoğlu mansion, the Hacı Bali mosque thought to have been built between 1357 and 1365, and the Cami-i Cedid — the Karşıyaka mosque — built in 1792 are worth seeing. So are the ethnography museum in Yenice, the Mültezim mansion at Pazarköy, and the statue of Köprülü Hamdi Bey, a hero of the Kuvâ-yi Milliye, at Yenice-Hamdibey. The Tahtakuşlar ethnography museum, which shows Turkmen culture more fully than anywhere else, has become identified with the mountain.
Turkmen villagers on Kaz Dağı still live in the traditional way, and in the last fifteen days of August each year they hold the Sarıkız festival on Sarıkız Tepesi in local dress and according to local custom. At Ayazma, where the portal says Aphrodite was chosen and the first beauty contest known to history was held, that tradition is carried on each August with the choosing of the Beauty of Kaz Dağı.
The mountain holds a great deal besides. There are archaeological sites — Ayazma, Çandır, Muhteşem Süleyman and Dalak Suyu in Bayramiç, Pınarbaşı at Güre — and natural ones: the Şahindere canyon, Hasanboğuldu, the Sutüven pools and the springs. Villages built of stone, viewing points at the forest watchtowers on the high ground, mineral waters and thermal springs complete it.
