Kemer Local Market

Kemer, a resort town about 43 kilometres west of Antalya on Turkey's Mediterranean coast, holds its main open-air market every Monday along Ataturk Boulevard, the street running from the town centre toward the main coastal road. Stalls stretch for several hundred metres, mostly shaded from the sun, selling fresh fruit and vegetables brought in from local farms alongside spices, olives, cheese, textiles and household goods.

Monday Produce, Tuesday Textiles

The Monday market is the largest fresh-produce market in town and the one worth planning around. Growers from the villages inland and along the coast bring in whatever is in season, from tomatoes, peppers and aubergines to melons, figs and herbs, alongside barrels of olives, tubs of white cheese, dried fruit and nuts, sacks of spices and the sweets that turn up on every Turkish market ground. Traders set up early and pack down in the late afternoon, and most deal in cash.

The same boulevard hosts a second, quite different market on Tuesdays, given over largely to textiles: clothing, fabric, towels, bed linen and shoes, sold cheaply and with the expectation that you will haggle. Between them the two days account for much of the local trade in Kemer, drawing shoppers from the surrounding villages as well as from the hotels. Sitting close to Kemer's marina, the market is an easy stop for provisioning or a stroll ashore, and it's worth a visit if you're chartering a gulet in Turkey and want a taste of everyday Turkish life beyond the beaches.

Shopping Streets Away from Market Day

On the other five days Ataturk Boulevard reverts to being the town's main shopping street, and the biggest and busiest one at that. The shopfronts run to jewellery and silver, leather jackets and bags, carpets and kilims, Turkish coffee and sweets, ceramics and the standard range of souvenirs, with cafes and restaurants filling the pavement tables in the evening. It is a short walk from the town's marina, which has around 320 berths, so the whole shopping district is within easy reach of anyone arriving by sea.

Kemer's main cultural stop sits right beside it. The Folkloric Yoruk Park, an open-air museum founded in 1982, occupies the pine-covered Kucukburun peninsula behind the marina, running roughly 300 metres out towards the sea. Laid out as a small ethnographic museum, it uses black goat-hair tents, tools, textiles and costumed figures to show how the Yoruks, the nomadic Turkic people who have moved between this coast and the Taurus pastures for centuries, actually lived.

How Kemer Got Its Name and Its Shape

The town's name comes from engineering rather than romance. Between 1916 and 1917 a stone wall some 23 kilometres long was built to channel the mountain streams away from the settlement and stop it flooding, and that structure gave the place its modern name. Before it was built the village was known simply as Eski Koy, the old village, and in antiquity the site carried the Greek name Idyros.

What turned a farming and fishing village into a resort was state planning. From the 1980s onwards this stretch of coast was developed under a World Bank-funded tourism programme, and the hotels went up along a shoreline that now runs to some 53 kilometres of coast backed by the western Taurus mountains. The district recorded 49,383 residents in 2022 across 412 square kilometres, with summer temperatures that regularly push past 40C. The Monday market remains one of the few places in town where the older, more local rhythm of life is still visible among the tourist shops.

Ancient Cities Within Reach

Kemer sits in the middle of one of the densest concentrations of ancient sites on the Turkish coast. Phaselis, about 16 kilometres south near Tekirova, was founded by Rhodian settlers in 690 BC and grew rich on three separate harbours; Alexander the Great took the city during his march through Asia Minor. Its main street, a Hadrianic gateway, an aqueduct and a theatre all survive, and two of the three ancient harbours are now simply beaches, which makes it one of the few archaeological sites where swimming is part of the visit. The city declined after the third century AD under pressure from piracy and later Arab raids, and lost its commercial role entirely once the Seljuks favoured Antalya and Alanya as ports.

Further down the same coast lies Olympos, one of only six cities powerful enough to hold three votes in the Lycian League. In the first century BC it became a pirate stronghold under a chief named Zeniketes, until the Roman commander Publius Servilius Vatia besieged his fortress; Zeniketes killed himself rather than surrender, and Olympos was expelled from the League before being readmitted a century later.

Above the neighbouring village of Cirali, the slope known as Yanartas carries dozens of small flames burning permanently from vents in the rock, spread across roughly 5,000 square metres. The gas is around 87 per cent methane, and the fires have been alight for at least 2,500 years; sailors once used them as a navigation mark. The ruins of a temple of Hephaistos sit just below, and in 1811 Francis Beaufort identified the spot as the mythical Mount Chimaera, the creature Homer described in the Iliad as a lion in front, a serpent behind and a goat in the middle.