Kaleici

Kaleiçi is the old walled quarter of Antalya, founded in the 2nd century BC by the Pergamene king Attalus II as the city of Attaleia. It sits on a low cliff above the Mediterranean, wrapped in a double ring of fortifications that curves inland from the seafront in the shape of a horseshoe and was added to more or less continuously from Hellenistic through Ottoman times. Inside those walls, roughly 3,000 traditional red-roofed houses line narrow cobbled lanes that drop down to the ancient harbour, now a working yacht marina. Almost every layer of the city's history is still readable somewhere in these few hundred metres of street, which is what separates Kaleiçi from the resort strips that spread east and west of it.

From Attaleia to the Ottoman Old Town

Attalus II founded the city around 150 BC and gave it his own name. The Pergamene kingdom was bequeathed to Rome in 133 BC by Attalus III, but Attaleia itself came under direct Roman control a little later, when the proconsul Publius Servilius Vatia Isauricus swept the Pamphylian and Lycian coasts during his campaign against the Cilician pirates in 77 BC. The deep, sheltered harbour was too useful to leave in pirate hands, and a decade after that Pompey used Attaleia as one of the bases where he gathered his fleet for the great anti-piracy campaign of 67 BC. The harbour is the reason the city exists at all, and it stayed the reason for the next two thousand years.

Roman prosperity is best measured by the monument the city put up for Emperor Hadrian, who visited in 130 AD. Byzantine rule followed, then the Seljuks: Sultan Kaykhusraw I took the city in 1207 and built its first mosque. Ottoman rule began in 1391 and brought roughly five centuries of relative stability, during which the timber-framed houses, courtyards and bay windows that define the quarter today took their present form. The walls themselves are a record of all of it, with Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Seljuk and Ottoman masonry sitting on top of one another in the same stretches of curtain.

The Monuments Inside the Walls

Hadrian's Gate is the obvious starting point. Three archways rise over four pylons to a height of about 8 metres, built almost entirely of white marble apart from the granite columns, and decorated with floral and rosette reliefs under a cornice carved with lion heads. The southern tower, known as Julia Sancta, is Roman; the lower part of the northern tower is Roman too, but its upper section was rebuilt in the first half of the thirteenth century under the Seljuks and carries Arabic inscriptions. For centuries the gate was swallowed by the later defensive walls and effectively lost from view. It was rediscovered in 1817, freed when the walls around it collapsed in the 1950s, and restored in 1959, a process that exposed the original Roman roadway beneath the arches.

The Yivli Minaret is the quarter's landmark from the sea. It stands 38 metres high, a red brick shaft of eight fluted sections rising from a massive square stone base and originally sheathed in turquoise and dark blue tiles. It was raised around 1230, in the reign of Alaaddin Keykubad I, on the site of a ruined Byzantine church. The mosque beside it was rebuilt in 1373 by Mehmet Bey of the Hamidid dynasty, and its prayer hall carries six domes on twelve columns with reused antique capitals. A restoration carried out between 2007 and 2010 uncovered historic water channels running underneath the building.

A short walk away, the Kesik Minare, or Broken Minaret, compresses the whole history of the quarter into one ruin. It began as a Roman temple in the second century AD, became a Byzantine church dedicated to the Virgin Mary in the seventh century, was converted into a mosque in the early thirteenth century when the Sultanate of Rum took Antalya, and was consecrated as a church again in 1361 after crusaders from Cyprus seized the city. The Ottomans returned it to use as a mosque under Şehzade Korkut. A fire in 1896 destroyed the main building and left only the truncated minaret standing, which is where the name comes from. Restoration work started in 2018 and the building reopened for worship on 5 March 2021, after roughly 125 years out of use.

At the seaward edge of the quarter, where Kaleiçi meets Karaalioğlu Park, stands the Hıdırlık Tower: a cylindrical drum of about 7.5 metres set on a square base of 6.5 metres, for a total height of roughly 14 metres, dated to the second century AD. Nobody has settled what it was for. Lighthouse, watchtower and monumental tomb have all been argued, and the twelve axe-shaped motifs cut into the stone, six on each side, are usually read as marking the standing of whoever was buried there.

Restoration, Museums and the Harbour Today

The quarter came close to being lost in the twentieth century, and the restoration programme that saved it earned the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism the Golden Apple Award in 1984. One of the better results of that work is the Suna and İnan Kıraç Kaleiçi Museum. Two derelict historic buildings were bought in 1993, restored by 1995, and opened to the public as a museum on 18 May 1996. The second of the pair is the former Greek Orthodox church of Aya Yorgi, or St George, whose eastern door carries an inscription written in Turkish using the Greek alphabet and dated 1863; it now serves as the museum's exhibition hall, a straightforward reminder of how mixed the old town's population once was.

What has kept Kaleiçi from turning into a museum piece is that people still live and work in it. Restored guesthouses, workshops, small galleries and waterfront cafés fill the lanes, the old Roman harbour below the walls now takes yachts and gulets rather than cargo, and Karaalioğlu Park gives the whole quarter a green edge above the sea. Further east along the coast the Lower Düden waterfall drops 40 metres straight off the cliff into the Mediterranean, one of the few waterfalls in the region that falls directly into the sea and a standard stop on boat trips out of the harbour. Between the monuments, the marina and the coast either side of it, the old town is worth a visit if you're chartering a gulet in Turkey along the Antalya shore.