İzmir is the gateway to the Turkish Aegean and, for many, a pleasant surprise: a large, bright, easy-going city that feels more like a southern European Mediterranean capital than the clichéd image of Turkey. Here life revolves around the sea: at sunset, half of İzmir heads out to stroll, jog or have a drink along the Kordon, the long seafront promenade lined with palm trees, cafés and horse-drawn carriages, while the sun sets over the bay and the ferries cross from one shore to the other. It is a young, secular and sociable city, proud of its open character.
It isn't a city of grand monuments (much of old Smyrna was lost in the earthquake and the great fire of 1922); it's a city of atmosphere, street life, markets and sea. Its old commercial quarter, the Kemeraltı bazaar, is a fascinating maze of shops, workshops, courtyards, mosques and cafés where the city's pulse beats; and its history, which goes back more than three millennia and lays claim to Homer himself, surfaces in the Roman Agora and in Kadifekale castle, high on the hill.
But İzmir's great asset is its location: it is the perfect base for discovering some of the most impressive archaeological treasures of the ancient world. Less than an hour away is Ephesus, one of the best-preserved Roman cities on the planet; a little further north, Pergamon, with its dizzying acropolis; and inland, the white terraces of Pamukkale. This guide helps you enjoy the city and plan the unmissable Aegean excursions from it.
İzmir is one of the oldest cities in the Mediterranean, with more than three thousand years of history. There was an early Bronze Age settlement and an archaic Greek Smyrna (in today's Bayraklı) that was one of the most important Ionian cities and that competed with others for the honour of being the birthplace of the poet Homer. Refounded on the orders of Alexander the Great on the slopes of Mount Pagos (Kadifekale), it flourished in Hellenistic and Roman times as one of the great cities of Asia Minor, with its monumental Agora. It was one of the earliest centres of Christianity (one of the seven churches of the Book of Revelation) and, later, a prosperous and cosmopolitan Ottoman city known as 'Infidel Smyrna' because of its large Greek, Armenian, Jewish and Levantine population. That multicultural world came to a tragic end in 1922, with the earthquake, the Greco-Turkish War and the great fire that destroyed much of the city. Rebuilt as a modern Turkish metropolis, today it preserves layers from all those eras, which we cover in detail on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The coast where Greek philosophy was born and where Ephesus, Smyrna and Halicarnassus shone: a shoreline of Ionian cities, ancient wonders and the trauma of 1922.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Smyrna is one of the oldest cities in the Mediterranean, with a history stretching back more than three thousand years. There was already a settlement in the area in the Bronze Age, but the first great city appeared around the 10th century BC in what is now the Bayraklı district, at the far end of the bay. This was ancient Smyrna, founded by Aeolian Greek settlers and later taken over by Ionians. It became one of the most important cities of Ionia, the prosperous federation of Greek cities on the coast of Asia Minor and the cradle of Greek philosophy, science and poetry.
Archaic Smyrna boasts a remarkable honour: it was one of the seven cities that claimed to be the birthplace of Homer, the legendary poet of the Iliad and the Odyssey, around the 8th century BC. None of it can be proven, but the tradition was so strong that the people of ancient Smyrna minted coins bearing the poet's image and dedicated a shrine to him, the Homereion. Whether or not it was his homeland, old Smyrna was a leading cultural centre of the Greek world.
The city thrived until around 600 BC, when it was destroyed by King Alyattes of Lydia, the powerful neighbouring kingdom whose capital, Sardis, lay inland. For a few centuries Smyrna was reduced to a scattering of villages. Its great revival was still to come, and it would arrive with the most famous conqueror of the ancient world.
Legend has it that Alexander the Great, after defeating the Persians in the 4th century BC, fell asleep while hunting on Mount Pagos (today's Kadifekale hill), and that the goddesses known as the Nemeses appeared to him in a dream and ordered him to refound Smyrna on those slopes. The oracle of Apollo confirmed the plan, and so, under Alexander and his successors, the city was reborn on a new site by the harbour, with a regular and monumental street plan. The 'new' Hellenistic Smyrna grew quickly and became one of the most beautiful and wealthy cities in Asia Minor.
Under Roman rule, from the 2nd century BC, Smyrna reached its peak. It was one of the most important cities in the province of Asia, competing with Ephesus and Pergamon for the title of 'first city', with temples, theatres, gymnasiums and a monumental Agora whose remains can still be visited. A devastating earthquake flattened the city in AD 178, but Emperor Marcus Aurelius paid for its reconstruction, and much of the Agora you see today dates from that rebuilding.
Smyrna was also one of the earliest and most important centres of Christianity. It appears in the New Testament as one of the seven churches of Asia addressed in the Book of Revelation. Its 2nd-century bishop, Polycarp, a disciple of the apostle John, was burned to death as a martyr in the city's stadium and is venerated as one of the great saints of the early Church. In the Byzantine era Smyrna remained a significant city. It was later fought over by the Seljuks, crusader knights (the Hospitallers even took control of the harbour) and other powers, until it finally became part of the Turkish world.
In the early 15th century Smyrna became part of the Ottoman Empire. Over time it grew into the main trading port of the Aegean and one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the eastern Mediterranean. Figs, raisins, tobacco, cotton and the famous Anatolian carpets left its harbour for Europe, while goods and ideas from the West came in.
What stood out most about Ottoman Smyrna was its extraordinary diversity. Alongside the Turkish Muslim population lived large communities of Orthodox Greeks, Armenians, Sephardic Jews (who arrived after their expulsion from Spain in 1492) and 'Levantines', families of European merchants from France, Italy, England and the Netherlands who had been settled there for generations. Each community had its own neighbourhoods, places of worship, schools and newspapers, making the city a mosaic of languages and religions. It was so prosperous, and felt so little 'Turkish', that the Ottomans themselves called it Gâvur İzmir, 'Smyrna the infidel'.
In the 19th and early 20th centuries Smyrna was a brilliant, European-style city, with trams, theatres, cafés, casinos and an elegant seafront promenade, the Kordon, which its residents were proud of. The large and wealthy Greek community saw it as a capital of Hellenism. That multicultural, sophisticated and seemingly indestructible world was about to vanish in the most brutal way.
The end of the First World War and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire opened one of the most tragic chapters in Smyrna's history. In 1919, as the victorious powers divided up Ottoman territory, the Greek army landed in Smyrna. Greece hoped to annex the city and its region, which had a large Greek population, as part of its plan for a 'Greater Greece'. This was the start of the Greco-Turkish War, fought bitterly across western Anatolia for three years.
The counter-offensive by the Turkish nationalist army, led by Mustafa Kemal (the future Atatürk), drove the Greek troops back until they were pushed into the sea. In September 1922, Turkish forces entered Smyrna. In the days that followed, a terrible fire broke out in the city's Greek and Armenian quarters and consumed almost all of them. The Great Fire of Smyrna destroyed much of the cosmopolitan city. Amid the flames, the violence and the panic, tens of thousands of people died and hundreds of thousands of Greeks and Armenians fled or were driven out. Crowds packed the quayside trying to board ships while the city burned behind them. Historians still debate the causes of the fire and who was responsible, but the outcome was unmistakable: it was the end of multicultural Smyrna.
The catastrophe was part of the great population exchange between Greece and Turkey agreed in 1923. Hundreds of thousands of Orthodox Greeks from Anatolia were moved to Greece, and Muslims from Greece to Turkey. The Greek and Armenian communities, which for centuries had been an essential part of Smyrna, disappeared almost entirely. It was the end of a world, and a wound that still echoes in the memory of both peoples.
A new city rose from the ashes of 1922. Modern Smyrna, now fully Turkish and officially called İzmir, was rebuilt over the 20th century to urban plans that created wide boulevards, parks and a new Kordon. It grew into Turkey's third-largest city, with more than four million people in its metropolitan area. Today it is a major port, an industrial and commercial centre, a venue for international trade fairs and a young, lively university city.
İzmir is known as the most secular, Western-leaning and liberal city in Turkey, and a stronghold of Atatürk's ideals (he spent part of his youth living and studying in the region). Its relaxed, open Mediterranean atmosphere, its street life, its seafront terraces and its tolerant outlook set it apart from the rest of the country. Turks themselves link it with an easygoing way of life and with good Aegean food, which is lighter and full of vegetables.
For travellers, İzmir is a pleasant seaside city, with the Kordon at sunset, the Kemeraltı bazaar and ferries crossing the bay. It is also the perfect base for exploring some of the great treasures of the ancient world, which are right on its doorstep: Ephesus, Pergamon, the House of the Virgin Mary, and the beaches and charming towns of Çeşme and Alaçatı. Beneath its modern surface, the city keeps the layers of three thousand years of history: Homer's Greek Smyrna, the Greco-Roman city of the Agora, cosmopolitan Ottoman Smyrna and the tragic Smyrna of 1922. Few cities have been reborn so many times, and few look to the future with so much Mediterranean light.
