Izmir tourist information

Smyrna becomes Izmir

Turks first captured Smyrna under the command of Çaka Bey in 1076. He conquered Clazomenae, Foça, Chios, Samos and Kos and used Izmir as a base for his raids against the Byzantine Empire in the Aegean Sea and Çanakkale Strait (Dardanelles). After his death, the town and its vicinity was re-conquered by the Byzantines in 1098. Smyrna was then captured by the Knights of Rhodes when Constantinople was conquered by the Crusaders in 1242.

Smyrna became a Turkish land, and became Izmir in the early 14th century when Turkish sailor Umur Bey, son of the founder of the Beylik of Aydin, took the city back from the Knights Templar. He first captured the fort of Kadifekale on top the city, still intact today, in 1310, and then the lower castle (St. Peter in European sources, "Okkale" in Turkish) and, as Çaka Bey had done 150 years before, used the city as a base for naval raids. The northern coastline of the Gulf of Izmir (Karsiyaka today) was, in the meantime, held by the sons of Saruhan, another Beylik based in Manisa. In 1344, taking advantage of a distracted Aydinoglu, the Genoese took back the lower castle. A sixty-year period of uneasy cohabitation between the three powers, the Aydinoglu, the Saruhan and the Genoese, ensued, with the first holding the upper castle of Izmir, the second Izmir's opposite coasts and the third the sea-side castle of St. Peter (Okkale), commanding the little inner bay where the port was formerly situated (this inner bay was been filled in the 17th century to constitute the present-day Kemeralti bazaar area).

Izmir was first taken by the Ottomans in 1389 by Bayezid I, who led his armies toward the five Western Anatolian Turkish Beyliks in the winter of that same year he had ascended the throne, in keeping with his nickname of Yildirim (the Thunderbolt). The take-over by the Ottomans took place virtually without a fight, through agreements, arrangements and marriages. But in 1402 the Mongol Tamerlane won a victory against the Ottomans and put a serious check on the fortunes of the Ottoman state for the following decades. Tamerlane gave back most of the Anatolian Turkish Beyliks to their former ruling families, and he came in person to Izmir to lodge the only battle of his career against a non-Muslim power, finally taking back the lower castle of Okkale (St. Peter) from the Genoese, and he destroyed the castle.

In 1425, Murad II re-captured Izmir for the Ottomans from the last bey of Aydin, Izmiroglu Cüneyd Bey, in a campaign in which he was assisted by the forces of the Templars. One detail of this siege that is pertinent for our day is that, in exchange for their assistance, the Knights Templar had asked the sultan the permission to re-build the European castle of Izmir (St. Peter, Okkale), but the sultan refused despite their insistence and even momentary tensions between the the two forces. He gave the Templars the permission to build the well-known Bodrum (Petrum) Castle of our day instead.

The city became a typical Ottoman sanjak (sub-province) inside the larger Ottoman vilayet (province) of Aydin. One notable development that took place in end-15th century and early-16th century was the arrival of Jews of Spain from where they were evicted. Along with Istanbul and Selanik, Izmir was one of their primary destinations of settlement. In 1597, on the ruins of St. Peter Castle, Hisar Mosque, Izmir's oldest important Ottoman landmark was built, the word hisar meaning the fort in Turkish. As stated above, the inner bay was filled through both the work of nature and the preference of men in the 17th century, in place of which Kemeralti bazaar now bustles with hectic activity.

With the privileged trading conditions accorded to foreigners in 1620 (the infamous capitulations that were later to cause a serious threat and setback for the Ottoman state in its decline), Izmir set out on its way for becoming one of the most important commercial centers of the Empire. Consulates of foreign countries moved in from Sakiz (Chios) and were established in the city (1619 for the French Consulate, 1621 for the British), serving as trade centers for their nations. Each consulate had its own quay and the ships under their flag would anchor there. The long campaign for the conquest of Crete (22 years between 1648-1669) also considerably enhanced Izmir's position within the Ottoman realm since the city served as port of dispatch and supply for the troops.

In the meantime, a middle class, composed of Greeks and, some time later and to a lesser extent, by Armenians, as well as some among the generally poorer Jews, started to take hold. The attraction the city exercised for merchants and middlemen gradually changed the demographic structure of the city, its culture and its Ottoman character.

The city faced a 1676 plague, the 1688 earthquake and the 1743 fire, but continued to grow. In 1866 the British-built 130 km railway line to Aydin was opened (the first Ottoman Empire line). As of the 18th century and especially of the 19th century, Izmir had a non-negligible segment of the population was composed of merchants of French, English, Dutch and Italian merchants, adding to numerous immigrants coming from other parts of the Ottoman Empire. One initiative that saved the city in late 19th century by putting an end to the fill of silt in the Gulf of Izmir, that had started to jeopardize access to the city's port, was the moving of Gediz River bed to its present-day northern course, instead of letting it flow into the Gulf.

After World War I and the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, the victors had, for a time, intended to carve up large parts of its territory under respective zones of influence and offered the western regions of Turkey to Greece under the Treaty of Sèvres. On 15 May 1919 the Greek Army occupied the city after but the Greek expedition into Anatolia turned into a disaster both for that country and for the Greeks in Turkey.

The Turkish army re-took possession of Izmir on the 9 September 1922, effectively ending the Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922) in the field. Part of the Greek population of the city was forced to seek refuge in the nearby Greek islands together with the Greek troops, while the rest was left in the frame of the ensuing 1923 agreement for the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations, part of the Lausanne Treaty.

The war, its events specific to Izmir, and the fire that broke out on 13 September 1922, one of the greatest disasters Izmir experienced in its history, the still controversial Great Fire of Smyrna, influenced the psyches of the two nations to this day. For the Turks, the occupation was marked from its very first day by the "first bullet" fired on Greek detachments by the journalist Hasan Tahsin and the killing by bayonet coups of Colonel Fethi Bey and his unarmed soldiers in the historic casern of the city (Sari Kisla—the Yellow Casern), for refusing to shout "Zito Venizelos". The Turkish side, on the other hand, was accused of a number of atrocities against the Greek and Armenian communities in Izmir, including the lynching of the Orthodox Metropolitan Chrysostomos. According to the former spokesman for the Bosnian Serb government Srda Trifkovic, the Turks massacred 200,000 inhabitants on the quay as crews of British, French, Italian and US warships anchored in the harbor looked on.

The city was, once again, gradually rebuilt after the proclamation of the Turkish Republic in 1923. The period after the 1960s and the 1970s saw another blow to the Izmir's tissue—as serious as the 1922 fire for many inhabitants—when local administrations tended to neglect Izmir's traditional values and landmarks, with some not always in tune with the central government in Ankara and regularly falling short of subsidies, and also with huge immigration waves from the Anatolian inlands causing a population explosion and modifying its human capital. Many Smyrniots—in line with native-born citizens of such other prominent Turkish cities as Istanbul, Bursa, Manisa, Adana and Mersin—look back to their cosier and more manageable city that came to end in the last few decades with nostalgia. Floor Ownership Law of 1965 (Kat Mülkiyeti Kanunu), allowing and encouraging arrangements between house or land proprietors and building contractors, in which each would share the benefits in rent of 8-floor apartment blocks built in the place of the former single house, proved especially disastrous for the urban landscape.

Modern Izmir Today, Izmir is Turkey's third largest city and is nicknamed "Occidental Izmir" or "The pearl of the Aegean". It is widely regarded as one of the most liberal Turkish cities in terms of values, ideology, lifestyle, dynamism and gender roles. It is a stronghold of the political party CHP.

Izmir is also home-town of some famous singers like Sezen Aksu.

The city hosts an international arts festival during June/July, and an international fair during August/September every year.

Modern Izmir also incorporates world-famous ancient cities like Ephesus, Pergamon, and Sardis.

There is one modern rapid transit line running Southwest to Northeast.