The Myndus gate
Located on the west side of Bodrum, this is one of the two entrances of ancient Halicarnassus. It was part of the towns wall. The gate is named after the place Myndos because it faces the ancient Myndos place (now Gümüslük).

A big handshake should go first to the companies Ericsson and Turkcell, who sponsored the excavation of Bodrum's town walls, which are a remarkable example of ancient Western Anatolia architecture.

Only some parts of the city walls remained until today. An important part of the town wall was the Myndos Gate where the soldiers of Alexander (*the great*) had a hard time to come into the town of Halicarnassus in 333 BC. After they captured the city they destroyed all buildings except the Mausoleum, which was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.

Extensive excavation and restoration has been done by the archeologists to bring this spot from ancient times to be better realized now. It is expected that the whole restoration of the town wall of nearly 4,5 kilometers will take four to five years to complete.

According to Arrianus, who describes this gate and and the siege of Alexander the Great in 334, this gate had originally three towers (that's why it was described as 'Tripollion'). It was also mentioned that in front of the gate was a ditch of 8 meters depth and 15 meters long. The middle part of the gate is totally destroyed now but ruins from the two other parts still exist and consist of huge and heavy square stones.
Tombs were found here and opened by Newton in the last century. They dated back to Hellenistic and Roman times and were made from burned clay.

Here - as nearly everywhere in Turkey Archeologists expect to find more remains underneath the rubble of 17 centuries

The most prominent feature of Bodrum is the castle of St. Peter.

The castle's origins date back to the knights of St. John
This group of expatriates began in the 11th century with a church and hospital in Jerusalem. Although belonging to he Catholic religion care was denied to no-one.
When the knights arrived they instructed their builders to remove all usable materials from the tomb of King Mausolos as the castle construction began in the 1400's.

The knights refered to the town as Mesy not knowing that they where in the ancient Halicarnassus. The fortress became known as the Castle of St. Peter, the Liberator, it served as the sole place of refugee for all Christians on the West Coast of Asia during the time of the crusades. For over a century the castle served as a stronghold in the knights community.
Under Turkish care the castle has undergone several uses including being a military base, a prison and a public bath.
But now it is one of the finest museums in this region
see also video.

The Amphi-theatre
The theatre full story) is another witness to the great past of Bodrum. Situated in the hillside over looking Bodrum this theatre whose capacity is around 13.000 was built during te Carian reign in the Hellenistic age (330 - 30 BC.). The theatre consists of three different sections: a place for the audience, a place for an orchestra and the stage. It became an open-air museum after the excavations in 1973.

A contemporary Bodrum Figure: "Fisherman of Halicarnassus"
Cevat Sakir Kabaagaçli, the scion of a prominent Ottoman family and Oxford don, was convicted in 1925 of some obscure crime and exiled to Bodrum. Bodrum was then considered beyond the pale of the civilized world, a simple and poor place that eked out a meager existence from the sea by fishing and sponge-diving. The journey was long and arduous, with the shadows of bandits lurking in the hills; the last stretch of the route from Milas was passable only on foot and muleback.
Cevat Sakir, who was to become the great raconteur of Turkish literature under the name "Fisherman of Halicarnassus," tells the story of his forced march in his memoirs. On a curve of the road, he reminisces, the sea "cracked upon the horizon without warning like a vast blue thundering infinity." The sea dominated the town, where it "infiltrated through alleys and courtyards with a shimmering transparent light." It "sparkled to an incomprehensible depth full of yearning and beauty and terror." The air was "dry and bright as if lit by an inner light." The town was "modest and dazzling white with straight lines that cut the sky's blue with knife-like precision." People lived close to the basics of existence with simple direct passions and the distilled wisdom of countless civilizations.
The exile fell in love with Bodrum and elected to remain there for most of the rest of his life. He became the town's grand old man, introduced new fishing techniques, planted trees (the palms lining the quay are his) and above all told the fantastic tales of an ancient Aegean civilization and of the passionate, broad-spirited, fatalistic people of the sea. Two generations of Bodrum's youth grew up under his spell.
In the early 60s a group of the Fisherman's disciples from Istanbul began to visit him in Bodrum in search of aesthetic ecstasy and spiritual purification. They included a classical scholar, the Turkish translator of Homer, two prominent painters, a political philosopher, a socialist theorizer. They initiated the tradition of the "Blue Voyage" sailing into the Aegean for a few weeks on a simple boat and confronting nature with as few amenities as possible. The late 60s, with its culture of the rejection of middle-class values, swelled their ranks. This was a time of staying in fishermen's houses and paying for room and board with a bottle of raki.
In the 70s, members of the middle class who were bold enough to experiment with the unconventional began to spend vacations in Bodrum. The turning point arrived when the singer Zeki Müren, the ultimate impersonation of the Turkish kitsch, announced his decision to settle in Bodrum. Around 1985, the number of tourists in town for the first time exceeded that of the native. Bodrum became the principal vacation haven of western Turkey, with all the conveniences and curses that ensue.
He also asked for the return of the Mausoleum parts to Bodrum in a letter adressed to the Queen of England, saying that such exquisite works of art were not finding their true place under the foggy and grey sky of London.
The letter he received in response stated as following:
"Thank you for reminding us of the matter, We have painted the ceiling where Mausolos and the Mausoleum is located in blue."

The burial chamber still seen today , was most probably robbed much earlier than the theft by the Knights of Rhodes.

Groups of English, French, and German knights undertook the work and its financing. Today, the towers of the castle are named after the countries that paid for their construction: English Tower, German Tower, and so on. In addition to these, there is another tower, 'Liman' or 'Harbor' Tower, that now serves as the main entrance to the castle. As originally constructed, this tower stood in the sea which has since been filled in. Another gate, called the 'Northern Moat Entrance', opens into the main plaza of Bodrum and originally was the castle's landward entrance. The land on which the castle stands was, at one time an island known as Zefirya, after Zephyros, the god of the west wind. The castle is thought to occupy the sites of what were the palace of King Mausolos and of a temple dedicated to Apollo, the principle deity worshipped by the Halicarnassans. Remains of the palace defensive walls are thought to still exist. The island was joined to the mainland in Hellenistic times, when Halikarnassos was part of the kingdom of Pergamon.

Examining the defense system of the castle, the first thing one notices is that the walls on the landward side are much stronger than those on the seaward side. This was because the chief threat to the castle, the Ottomans, would have come from that direction. In those days, threats from the sea would have been less of a worry because the Knights of Rhodes kept the Aegean under their strict control.

In its heyday, the castle was probably manned by fifty knights and perhaps three times that many ordinary soldiers. The knights hailed from seven different European countries and shared in the defense of the castle and its countryside. The castle's defenses were never put to the test, for the Ottomans never attacked it. Instead in 1522, they besieged the island of Rhodes led by their sultan, Süleyman the Magnificent. After holding out for three months, terms were agreed to, under which the Knights had to evacuate Rhodes and five other of their strongholds in the eastern Mediterranean. Petronium was one of them. In January of the following year, the Knights set sail, eventually ending up on Malta in 1530.

The subsequent military history of the castle is rather insignificant. In 1770 the Russian fleet bombarded it briefly. During the first world war, the French did the same but with somewhat more success: they managed to demolish one side of the English Tower.
Bodrum was occupied by the Italians during the same war and while here, they used the castle as a base, and rebuilt the Italian Tower in the form we see today. In the decades following the establishment of the Turkish Republic (1923), the castle suffered from neglect and decay. A few dwellings were built inside and the mosque and bath were used but in the main, people seem to have avoided it.

In the 60s, a decision was made to turn the castle into an archaeological museum. In the years since then, it has been undergoing restoration. Today, it is one of the world's most distinguished museums specializing in underwater archaeology though it also has a fine collection of other antiquities as well.
More of the museum
The Castle
The Castle of the Hospitaller Knights occupies the tip of the wedge-like peninsula at the center of Bodrum. It is a splendid incarnation of medieval western military architecture, built at a time when the European Middle Ages were quite over and castles of this type were fast becoming objects of nostalgia. Its massive conglomeration of courtyards, turrets, crenellated walls, galleries and sunken gardens is best explored in the stillness of noon..
Amateurs of heraldry may recognize the Plantagenet, d'Aubusson, Loredan and other prominent coats-of arms on the ramparts. Much to the delight of the tourist guides, each of the five turrets are called by the nationality of their original sponsors: the English, French, German, Italian and Spanish Towers. Parts of the walls are built of large slabs of greenish granite which the knights removed from the ruins of the Mausoleum. Other classical fragments are gathered for display in the inner courts. Peacocks strut among marble statues and mollusk-encrusted amphorae.
As interesting as the castle itself are the collections of the Museum of Underwater Archeology housed within the premises. The museum, the most important of its kind in the world, is the brainchild of Professor George Bass, and his Institute of Nautical Archaeology, and contains treasures from a series of historic wrecks discovered on Turkey's southern shores. Mycenaean and Canaanite artifacts recovered from a l2th century B.C. wreck found off Cape Gelidonya (Antalya) in 1960 formed the original core of the museum. On display in the castle's Gothic Chapel is a full scale reconstruction of one third of an Eastern Roman wreck from the 7th century A.D. excavated by Dr. Bass. Finds from the world's oldest known shipwreck, a 14th century B.C. vessel recently excavated off Uluburun (Kas), will soon join the collection. The Italian Tower houses coins and jewelry from all periods. Most impressive of all is the Glass Hall containing a spectacular cargo of medieval glassware from an 11th century Islamic wreck.