The castle on the peninsula commanding Marmaris harbour has housed the Marmaris Museum since 1991, and the museum holds a substantial part of the finds from the ancient city of Knidos alongside archaeological and ethnographic works of the region. From the castle there is a panoramic view over Marmaris.
Herodotus gives the castle a past reaching back to the third millennium BC, when it was part of Physkos, an important port city of Caria. Alexander the Great repaired it in the Hellenistic period, and in 1522, before his Rhodes campaign, Süleyman the Magnificent rebuilt it and used it as a military base. French naval guns damaged it in 1914, and people went on living in it until the republican period; after restoration it was arranged as a museum. It is registered as a first-degree monumental structure.
At the entrance stands the Hafsa Sultan caravanserai of 1545 — rectangular, two storeys, with its own bath — built to serve the trade and lodging of the day. The museum is run by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and is open through the year.
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).
Visiting hours
- Hours
- 08:30 - 18:45
