Selimiye

Selimiye is a fishing village on the Bozburun Peninsula, part of the Marmaris district of Muğla province, reached by a winding coastal road roughly 38 kilometres from central Marmaris. It faces a deep, almost enclosed bay ringed by pine-covered hills, and the combination of good shelter, clear water and a waterfront still lined with fishing boats has made it one of the most sought-after overnight stops on this stretch of the Turkish coast. The village is quiet out of season and busy in July and August, but it has never been built up in the way the resorts closer to Marmaris have.

Hydas, Losta, Kızılköy, Selimiye

The settlement's history stretches back to antiquity. It was known in ancient times as Hydas, a town of Caria recorded by Pliny the Elder in the fifth book of his Natural History, its name written in Greek as Hydas or Hyda. The ancient site sits on a ridge above the bay, where a circuit of walls, a tower and an unusual pyramidal tomb still stand among the olive terraces. The name of the place changed repeatedly over the centuries: Losta in the Byzantine period, then Kızılköy, "red village", after the colour of the sunsets over the water, before the village was renamed Selimiye in 1891 in honour of the Ottoman sultan Selim.

What Survives Around the Bay

Traces of that long occupation are scattered right around the shoreline. Sections of city wall from the Hellenistic period survive on the hills southeast of the cove; there is a watchtower close to the shore, a stone lighthouse, the ruins of a small theatre and of churches, and the remains of three separate castles, one on the high point above the village, one on Sarıkaya hill and one in the Kızılköy quarter. None of this is a fenced, ticketed archaeological park, which is part of its appeal: the ruins sit among olive groves and pine woodland, and most of them can be reached on foot from the harbour in an hour or less.

The Peninsula and the Carian Trail

Antiquity knew this promontory as the Carian Chersonese, and from roughly the fifth to the first century BC it formed part of the Rhodian Peraea, the mainland territory governed and colonised from nearby Rhodes, whose harbour lies only about 22 kilometres from the peninsula's tip. Ruined settlements including Bybassos, Hygassos, Kastabos, Tymnos, Syrna and Thysanos are scattered across it, and the fortified bay of Loryma at the southern end was one of the classical fleet anchorages of the region. Selimiye sits in the middle of all this, which is why so much survives within walking distance of the water.

On foot, the peninsula forms the opening section of the Carian Trail, the roughly 820-kilometre long-distance path through Muğla and Aydın provinces that officially opened in February 2013 after four winters of route-finding by its founders. The Bozburun stage runs 141.2 kilometres from İçmeler through Turunç, Bozburun and Selimiye to Hisarönü, waymarked in the red-and-white stripes of the European long-distance convention. From the neighbouring village of Turgut the trail climbs through olive groves and forested slopes to the ridge-top ruins of Hydas, which means walkers arriving in Selimiye in spring and autumn are almost as common as sailors are in summer.

Boats, Fishing and the Blue Cruise

Selimiye's economy has always faced the sea. The village was cut off from the main road network for a long time, which left its people dependent on fishing, boat work and olives rather than on farming inland, and that isolation is a large part of why the old harbour front survived intact. Neighbouring Bozburun is still one of the last places in Turkey where wooden gulets are built by hand in small yards along the shore, using methods passed down through generations of local shipwrights, and a good number of the charter boats working this coast were born within a few kilometres of Selimiye's bay. Tourism arrived properly only from the 1980s onward, and it arrived by water before it arrived by road.

Sitting midway along the peninsula, between the open Aegean and the sheltered gulfs closer to Marmaris, Selimiye is a natural overnight stop for yachts working their way around the coast, and many gulet cruises from Marmaris call in here on longer itineraries around the peninsula. Boats anchor off in the bay, tenders run in to the quay, and the evening routine has barely changed: a walk along the front, a table at one of the fish restaurants, and the anchor lights of the fleet strung out across the dark water.