İzmir is the Aegean coast's own city, and the reason to give it more than a night is that almost everything worth seeing in western Türkiye is within a morning's drive of it. Ephesus and Pergamon are both in this province, and both are on the UNESCO World Heritage List. The city itself curves around a deep gulf, and its seafront — the Kordon at Alsancak — is where the place is at its most itself.
People have lived along this gulf for a very long time. Neolithic life reached the Aegean shore between nine and eight thousand years ago, and settlements of that age have been found at Yeşilova Höyük in Bornova, Tepeüstü in Urla, Çaltıdere in Aliağa and several mounds around Menemen. At Ulucak Höyük in Kemalpaşa the excavators uncovered houses of mudbrick on stone foundations with a street running between them — a laid-out village, not a camp — and the settlement there ends in the middle of the sixth millennium BC.
