Dikili

Dikili is a small port town on the Aegean coast of Izmir Province, facing the Greek island of Lesbos across the strait and set roughly 120 kilometres north of Izmir city. The district covers 534 square kilometres and recorded a population of 47,360 at the 2022 census, a density of under ninety people per square kilometre spread across thirty neighbourhoods of olive groves, pine-covered hills and a long, indented shoreline. It lies at roughly 39 degrees 4 minutes north, 26 degrees 53 minutes east, on the Dikili Gulf, a body of water about thirty kilometres from north to south, bounded by the Gulf of Edremit above and the Gulf of Candarli below, with the Turkish state highway D550 tracing its coast the whole way.

The Town and Its Coast

The town centre is low-rise and unhurried, arranged around a working harbour that also takes the occasional cruise call. Its most unusual survivor is the wooden Merkez Mosque, built in 1789 without a single nail, a rare timber construction on a coast where stone and brick are the norm. The rest of the district fans out from there into thirty neighbourhoods, among them Bademli, Denizkoy, Candarli, Esentepe, Merdivenli, Nebiler and Kocaoba, with the beaches concentrated around Bademli and Denizkoy and pine forest running inland towards the Madra Stream.

Bademli marks the southernmost point of the Dikili Gulf and is also the jumping-off point for the district's two islets. Garip Island, recorded in ancient sources under the name Argounissai, sits roughly 400 metres offshore and is reached by boat from Bademli, as is neighbouring Kalem Island. Garip briefly made the news in April 2007, when its private owner put it on the market with a reported 22 million dollar asking price and residents of nearby Lesbos were said to be among the interested buyers. It never changed hands in that sale, and it remains a low, scrub-covered day-trip destination rather than anything developed.

Atarneus, Pitane and the Castle at Candarli

Northeast of the town, at a rise known as Kale Tepe, lie the largely unexcavated remains of Atarneus, an ancient city of Aeolis that faced Lesbos across the water. Herodotus records that Cyrus the Great handed Atarneus and its territory to the Chians in return for their surrender of Pactyes the Lydian. The city's high point came in the 4th century BC under Hermias, who ruled the coast from Atarneus as far as Assos and who had studied at Plato's Academy, where he met Aristotle. Aristotle himself had been brought up by Proxenus of Atarneus and later married Hermias' niece Pythias. The city was deserted in the 1st century BC, possibly after an epidemic, and by Pliny the Elder's day it was recorded as no longer being a city at all.

Some fifteen kilometres south as the crow flies, the seaside township of Candarli, home to 8,021 people at the 2022 census, occupies the site of ancient Pitane, another Aeolian foundation, on the northern shore of the Gulf of Candarli opposite Aliaga. Its landmark is a compact fortress on a near-square plan with five towers, raised by the Genoese in the 14th century to protect their trading interests on this coast and rebuilt in the 15th century by the Ottoman grand vizier Candarli Halil Pasha the Younger, whose family gave the town its modern name. The castle stands intact and open to visitors, and it is carried on UNESCO's tentative list as part of a proposed serial nomination covering Genoese trading posts and fortifications.

Pergamon, Half an Hour Inland

Dikili's biggest draw is not in Dikili at all. The ruins of Pergamon at Bergama lie about 26 kilometres east of the port, roughly a thirty-minute drive, and were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2014 as Pergamon and its Multi-Layered Cultural Landscape. The acropolis crowns a mesa 335 metres high, and the Attalid dynasty ruled from it between 281 and 133 BC, making it one of the great cultural centres of the Hellenistic world.

Its library is credited with at least 200,000 scrolls, second in the Greek world only to Alexandria, and the English word parchment descends from pergamenos, meaning from Pergamon. The theatre, cut into the hillside in 78 rows for around ten thousand spectators and standing 36 metres high, is the steepest to survive from antiquity. The Great Altar carried a Gigantomachy frieze 113 metres long, the second longest surviving from the ancient world, while the Red Basilica, a temple to Egyptian gods, rests on the largest bridge substructure known from antiquity, roughly 193 metres across. Three kilometres south of the acropolis, the Asclepieion healing sanctuary is approached along an 820-metre colonnaded sacred way. A cable car opened in May 2010 covers the 700 metres up to the acropolis entrance in about three minutes.

Springs, Waterfalls and When to Go

Inland, the district is dotted with thermal springs. The villages of Nebiler, Bademli and Kocaoba all have them, and Nebiler pairs its spring with a waterfall and walking country that pulls people out of the coastal heat. Elsewhere the landscape throws up oddities: a volcanic crater lake near Merdivenli, and old caverns around the villages of Demirtas and Deliktas.

The climate is hot-summer Mediterranean in the Koppen classification, with hot dry summers and mild, moderately wet winters. Average annual precipitation is a little under 600 millimetres and the district records roughly 2,856 hours of sunshine a year, so the swimming season runs long. Ferries link Dikili to Mytilene on Lesbos through the season, several sailings a week at fares usually in the ten to fifteen euro range, which makes a Greek island day trip unusually easy from a Turkish mainland port of this size. The harbour's calm anchorage and its position on the sailing route between the Turkish mainland and the nearby Greek islands make Dikili worth a visit if you're chartering a gulet in Turkey.