Marmaris Castle

Marmaris Castle sits on a low rise above the old harbour, at the point where the town's narrow lanes climb away from the waterfront. In its present form it is an Ottoman fortress, rebuilt from the ground up by Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent in 1522 as a staging post for his campaign to take Rhodes, and since 1991 it has housed the Marmaris Archaeology Museum. The building is modest by the standards of Ottoman military architecture, but it has outlasted a naval bombardment, an earthquake that levelled the town around it, and several decades of use as an ordinary residential quarter.

From Physkos to Suleiman's Fortress

Long before the Ottomans, the site was the Carian harbour town of Physkos, recorded from the 6th century BC and belonging to the part of Caria controlled by Rhodes. Its natural harbour, one of the best on this coast, made it a trading link between inland Anatolia and the Aegean islands. Herodotus is traditionally credited with the claim that a fortification stood here as far back as the third millennium BC, although that assertion is repeated far more often than it is documented. Better attested is what happened when Alexander the Great arrived in 334 BC: the town's six hundred or so inhabitants burned their valuables inside the castle and fled into the hills rather than submit. The modern name is generally traced to the Greek word for marble, a reflection of the port's role in shipping stone.

The castle as it stands belongs to a single moment of Ottoman strategy. In 1522 Suleiman moved against the Knights of St John on Rhodes, and Marmaris, the closest sheltered anchorage on the mainland, became the assembly point for the Ottoman navy. The fortress was rebuilt from scratch that year to accommodate the garrison, and the seventeenth-century Ottoman traveller Evliya Celebi recorded in his travelogue that the sultan had ordered its construction ahead of the expedition. Rhodes fell at the end of that year, and the castle settled into a long, quiet career as a garrison watching over the bay.

Bombardment, Earthquake and Survival

Two events in the twentieth century nearly decided the building's fate. During the First World War a French warship shelled Marmaris and destroyed a significant part of the castle. Then, in 1957, the two Fethiye earthquakes flattened almost the entire town; the castle and the historic houses immediately around it were among the very few structures left undamaged. Through all of this the fortress was lived in rather than preserved. Until 1979 its walls enclosed 18 dwellings, a fountain and a cistern, and only when the last residents moved out could restoration begin. The site was registered as a protected monument in 1983, and the Ministry of Culture and Tourism opened it to the public as a museum on 18 May 1991. A further year-long restoration, using the khorasan mortar that Seljuk and Ottoman builders had worked with, closed the castle again before it reopened in October 2013.

The Fortress and Its Museum

The castle is built directly on the bedrock of the hill, in a mixture of cut ashlar and rubble masonry, with four bastions set at the corners of its irregular plan. Seven covered rooms with barrel-vaulted ceilings run inside the circuit of walls, and these now serve as the museum's galleries. The open inner courtyard is used as an outdoor display area, laid out with altars, column shafts and capitals, gravestones and Ottoman-period stonework, along with amphorae and other material recovered from the seabed. Stairs on either side of the courtyard lead up onto the ramparts, where the walkway gives one of the best views in Marmaris over the harbour, the marina and the pine-covered hills across the water.

The collection is arranged in four exhibition halls and runs chronologically from the Bronze Age through the Archaic, Classical, Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine periods to the Turkish Republic. The Knidos Hall holds material brought from Datca on the Resadiye peninsula, including marble statues and heads, figurines, ornaments, amphorae, pottery and a bronze scabbard. Next to it, the Burgaz-Emecik Hall displays limestone statuettes and baked-clay figurines of the Archaic period, recovered from excavations at Burgaz and Emecik in the same district.

The Marmaris and Its Environment Hall, at the junction of the castle's eastern and southern walls, gathers gold objects, coins, glass, ornaments, figurines and pottery from the ancient cities scattered around the modern town, among them Physkos, Amos, Kastabos, Hydas, Erine, Tymnos, Bybassos and Phoenix. The fourth room, the Stone Works Hall, is given over to gravestones, ossuaries in which ashes and bones were placed, carved friezes and statue heads, while an ethnography section covers the more recent life of the district. Roughly sixty thousand people were visiting the museum each year before the last restoration.

Visiting the Castle

The castle stands within easy walking distance of the marina and the old town, reached by a short climb through the narrow streets of the historic quarter and well signposted from the seafront. Spring and autumn are the most comfortable seasons to visit, since the courtyard and ramparts offer little shade in high summer, and the light over the harbour is at its best in the late afternoon. It is an easy pairing with time on the water: many visitors combine a day of sightseeing with a private gulet charter from Marmaris, setting the castle's Ottoman history against an afternoon spent in the bay directly below its walls.