Bodrum Castle and Underwater Archeology Museum

Bodrum Castle was raised on a small headland separating the town's two bays, its construction begun in 1402 by the Knights Hospitaller under Grand Master Philibert de Naillac. Needing a mainland stronghold to support their headquarters on Rhodes, the knights built its walls partly from carved stone salvaged from the ruined Mausoleum at Halicarnassus nearby, and each of the order's national divisions raised its own tower, among them the English, French, German, and Italian towers, each reflecting the building style of its builders. Dedicated to Saint Peter and known for centuries as the Castle of St Peter, it is the structure from which the modern town most probably takes its name.

Built from a Wonder of the Ancient World

Work was supervised by a German knight-architect, Heinrich Schlegelholt, and proceeded slowly across the century. The chapel was among the first inner buildings finished, probably around 1406; the three-storey English tower was completed in 1413; and the first ring of walls was not done until 1437, with an outer line of defences and further towers added later in the same century.

The building material tells its own story. The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus — the tomb of the Carian ruler Mausolus and one of the seven wonders of the ancient world — had stood a short walk inland for some sixteen centuries before a sequence of medieval earthquakes brought it down. The knights quarried the ruin systematically: squared green volcanic stone, marble columns and carved reliefs went into the castle, and much of the rest was burned for lime to make mortar. Between 1505 and 1507 even the surviving sculpture was pulled in, and by 1522 almost every block of the mausoleum had gone. Some reliefs are still visible set into the castle walls; other fragments were recovered in the British excavations of the 1850s and are now in the British Museum.

Towers, Arms and the Langues

The Hospitallers were organised into "langues", national divisions drawn from across Latin Christendom, and at Bodrum each took responsibility for its own tower. The English, French, German and Italian towers survive, along with a fifth known as the Snake Tower, and the differences in masonry and proportion between them are easy to pick out from the inner courtyards. Hundreds of carved coats of arms are set into the walls — those of grand masters, of individual knights and of the order itself — including, on the English Tower, the arms of King Henry IV of England. Together they amount to one of the largest surviving collections of Hospitaller heraldry anywhere.

Mosque, Garrison, Prison

After the Ottoman conquest of 1522, the castle's chapel was converted into a mosque, and the fortress went on to serve as a military post before becoming a prison by the late 19th century. The surrender came as part of the settlement that ended the great siege of Rhodes: with their headquarters lost, the knights gave up Bodrum without a fight and left the eastern Mediterranean altogether. A minaret was added to the converted chapel, and the castle remained in Ottoman hands for roughly four hundred years, garrisoned during the Greek revolt of 1824 and handed to the prison service in 1895. The minaret was destroyed by shelling from a French warship in 1915 and only rebuilt, in its original form, in 1997. By the end of the First World War the fortress had outlived every purpose it was built for, and it stood empty for decades.

The Museum of Underwater Archaeology

Left empty for roughly four decades after the First World War, the castle was finally given a new purpose in 1962, when its halls and courtyards were converted into the Bodrum Museum of Underwater Archaeology, now home to shipwreck cargoes and maritime artifacts recovered from the Aegean seabed. It opened to visitors two years later and has grown alongside the excavations that supply it, many of them run from Bodrum itself by the Institute of Nautical Archaeology under George F. Bass and later Cemal Pulak.

Its centrepiece is the Uluburun wreck, a Late Bronze Age trading ship that went down off the Lycian coast in the late 14th century BC. Spotted by a sponge diver in 1982 and excavated between 1984 and 1994, it yielded roughly ten tons of Cypriot copper ingots, a ton of tin and around 150 glass ingots, along with ebony, ivory, amber and a gold scarab bearing the name of Nefertiti — the richest single assemblage of Bronze Age trade goods ever recovered. Elsewhere in the castle, the Glass Wreck hall displays an eleventh-century ship that sank at Serçe Limanı carrying a cargo of broken glass for recycling, and the Carian Princess hall holds an intact sarcophagus and its gold jewellery, found in Bodrum in 1989 during building work.

Visiting the Castle

Today the castle is Bodrum's most recognizable landmark, its towers visible from almost every point on the water, and for many travelers a walk through its halls is simply the prelude to a Bodrum gulet cruise along the coastline it once guarded. It opens daily, a single ticket covers both the fortress and the museum, and a full circuit of the ramparts, courtyards and exhibition halls takes a couple of hours. The castle was added to Turkey's UNESCO tentative list in 2016. Go late in the day if you can: the climb to the top of the French Tower gives the best view there is of the harbour, the marina and the gulets coming in for the evening.