5 Days in İzmir

Start at the Clock Tower, the symbol of the city and the place everyone arranges to meet. It went up in 1901 for the 25th anniversary of Sultan Abdülhamid II's reign, designed by Raymond Charles Péré, a French architect who had settled in İzmir. It's 25 m of carved stone in a sort of Ottoman-Moorish style, with four fountains around the base. The clocks are said to have been a gift from the German Kaiser Wilhelm II, a story you'll hear from every guide in the square, though nobody has found a document that proves it.

Next to it is the small Konak Mosque, octagonal and covered in tiles, built in 1755 by a wealthy woman called Ayşe Hanım. Behind you is the Government House of 1872, and to the north along the water is the old 19th-century customs house, now Konak Pier. You'll often read that Gustave Eiffel designed it. No document has ever shown that, and Turkish researchers working in the Ottoman archives point to the architect Alexandre Vallaury instead. The shopping mall inside has mostly emptied out, so admire the building and move on.

Cross the road from the tower into Anafartalar Caddesi and you're in Kemeraltı, the old bazaar. Most of it stands on land that was the city's inner harbor until it silted up and was filled in during the 17th century, which is why the lanes wander the way they do. It's one of the biggest open-air bazaars in Turkey, a maze of hundreds of shops, old hans (merchant inns), mosques, fountains and synagogues, and it's on UNESCO's tentative list as the heart of the "Historical Port City of İzmir".

This isn't a souvenir bazaar. People come here for wedding dresses, copper pots, spices, fabric and spare parts, and each trade still has its own street. Walk without a plan, but find your way to Havra Sokağı, the market street for fish, olives and cheese, and to the Hisar Mosque, built around 1597 by Yakup Bey, a descendant of the Aydınoğlu family who ruled here before the Ottomans. It's the largest historic mosque in the city, and its painted wooden ceiling is worth taking your shoes off for. A few steps away, the Salepçioğlu Mosque, finished in 1906, is the opposite: late Ottoman and full of baroque flourishes.

A few steps from the Hisar Mosque is Kızlarağası Han, built in 1744-45 by Hacı Beşir Ağa, the chief black eunuch of the Ottoman palace and one of the richest men of his time. Traveling merchants slept upstairs and kept their goods and animals below. It was in ruins by the 1980s and rebuilt almost from its foundations, reopening in 1993, and today it's the best-preserved Ottoman han in İzmir, full of carpet, copper and souvenir shops.

The reason to come is the courtyard, where the cafés serve Turkish coffee under the arcades. Order it orta (medium sweet) and take your time. On the way out, stop at the tiny stall behind the Hisar Mosque that has been selling şambali, a syrup-soaked semolina cake, since 1942.

For lunch, eat where the shopkeepers eat: an esnaf lokantası, a tradesmen's canteen with a row of steaming trays in the window. You point at what you want, it arrives in a minute and it costs a fraction of a restaurant meal. Look for İzmir köfte (meatballs baked with potatoes, peppers and tomato), stuffed peppers, beans in olive oil and whatever the day's soup is.

Kısmet Lokantası, hidden inside Küçük Demirhan and cooking since 1967, and Tarihi Güven Lokantası in Hisarönü, going since 1939, are two of the best. Kısmet serves lunch only and closes on Sundays, and at both the best dishes are gone by 2pm.

Ten minutes east through the back streets of Kemeraltı is the Agora of Smyrna, the Roman city's marketplace. It was flattened by an earthquake in 178 AD and rebuilt with the help of the emperor Marcus Aurelius, and his wife Faustina's portrait is still carved on the keystone of the arch you pass on the way in. Standing in a square of columns, you can see how Roman Smyrna climbed the slope of Kadifekale above you.

Don't skip the basement. Under the basilica on the north side, long stone vaults stay cool on the hottest days, and water from a spring still runs through the channels. The plaster walls carry one of the largest collections of ancient graffiti found anywhere: ships, gladiators, names and love notes. The excavation is very much alive, too. In 2026 archaeologists found three new rooms, two with mosaic floors, so some parts may be fenced off when you visit.

Walk north to Pasaport, the old ferry pier, and join the rest of the city on the Kordon, the waterfront that runs from here to Alsancak. The quay was built in 1869-75 by a French company, and the grand merchant houses along it burned in 1922. What replaced them is plainer, but nobody comes here for the buildings. They come for the sunset, which drops straight into the gulf behind the mountains.

Do what locals do: sit on the grass or the sea wall with a bag of çiğdem (sunflower seeds, and only İzmir calls them that), watch the fishermen and the ferries, and buy midye dolma, mussels stuffed with spiced rice, from one of the sellers with a tray. You squeeze lemon on each one and eat it with the top shell as a spoon. The seller will keep opening them until you tell him to stop.

Dinner on the first night should be the İzmir classic: rakı-balık, rakı and fish. Tables fill up with cold meze first: Aegean greens in olive oil like şevketi bostan and deniz börülcesi (samphire), white cheese, melon, fava, octopus salad, and the fish comes later, if anyone still has room. Rakı, the anise spirit, goes cloudy white when you add water, which is why it's nicknamed lion's milk. Nobody drinks it fast.

On the Kordon, Deniz Restaurant (since 1981) and Sakız (since 1989) are the long-standing choices, both a short walk up the waterfront from Pasaport. Book a table outside on weekends.

Kadifekale, the "velvet castle", sits on top of Mount Pagos, the hill where Smyrna was refounded after 334 BC. The legend is that Alexander the Great fell asleep here after a hunt, and the two Nemeses, the city's goddesses, appeared in a dream and told him to build a new city on the hill. The real builders were his successors, Antigonus and Lysimachus. What stands today is mostly Byzantine and Ottoman repair work on those foundations, with a huge vaulted cistern inside the walls.

Come for the view, the best in the city: the whole gulf, the old town at your feet and Karşıyaka on the far shore. Since May 2026 there's also a memorial area to Saint Polycarp, the bishop of Smyrna who was martyred in the city's stadium around 155-160 AD and became its patron saint, with panels on him and on the Seven Churches of the Book of Revelation, of which Smyrna was one. On the way down, look over the fence on the north slope at the Roman theatre that archaeologists are digging out. It held around 20,000 people and isn't open to visitors yet.

Walk down through the neighborhood into the eastern corner of Kemeraltı, where havra means synagogue and Havra Sokağı, "Synagogue Street", is now a market lane. Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 settled across the Ottoman Empire, and in the late 16th and 17th centuries many moved here from Salonica and other Ottoman cities and built a whole quarter. Nine historic synagogues and prayer houses survive within a few hundred meters, some of them wall to wall, and the heritage route takes in Etz Hayim, Bikur Holim, Sinyora Giveret, Algazi, Şalom, Hevra, Portugal and Beit Hillel, plus the old chief rabbinate. Nowhere else in the world has a cluster quite like it.

The most famous man born in this quarter is Sabbatai Zevi, who declared himself the Messiah in 1665 and set the Jewish world on fire before converting to Islam under Ottoman pressure a year later. Etz Hayim, thought to be the oldest synagogue in the city and possibly Byzantine in origin, has been restored and hosts exhibitions and concerts. A small Jewish community still lives in İzmir, mostly in newer parts of town.

Lunch is İzmir street food at its most local. Söğüş is boiled beef cheek, tongue and brain, sliced cold and piled into bread with tomato, onion, parsley and cumin. It sounds like a dare and tastes like very good cold cuts. Meşhur Hisarönü Söğüşçüsü, on a corner near the Hisar Mosque since 1975, is the famous one.

If that's a step too far, have a kumru instead, a sesame-crusted roll grilled with sucuk (spicy sausage), cheese and tomato. Kumrucu Apo, going since around 1970, has no sign and a line of locals outside; ask anyone in the lanes near Yenigün and they'll point.

Take the afternoon slowly. When the heat goes out of the day, walk south from Konak along the seafront promenade, about half an hour, to Karataş, where the Jews of İzmir moved from Kemeraltı at the end of the 19th century. The neighborhood sits at the foot of a cliff, and until 1907 the only way up was 155 steps. That year Nesim Levi Bayraklıoğlu, a Jewish businessman, built the Asansör, a brick tower with a lift inside it. It ran on water power until it was converted to electricity in 1985, it's free, and it still carries people up and down all day.

At the top, walk out onto the bridge for one of the best sunsets in İzmir. The street that leads away from it is named after Dario Moreno, the singer born David Arugete in 1921, who grew up on this street and went on to become a star in France. One of his songs is "Canım İzmir", "My dear İzmir". Back at the bottom, on Mithatpaşa Caddesi, the Beth Israel Synagogue of 1907 is the largest in the city and still in use.

For dinner, take a taxi back north towards Pasaport for çöp şiş, the Aegean kebab: tiny cubes of lamb on thin wooden skewers, grilled fast over charcoal and eaten wrapped in thin flatbread with onion and parsley. You order them by the dozen. Topçu'nun Yeri started as a street cart in 1957 and has been doing little else ever since.

Breakfast in İzmir is boyoz: a small, round, very flaky pastry, made with sunflower oil rather than butter, eaten with a glass of tea and an egg, ideally a haminne egg, slow-cooked for hours until the white turns brown, another Sephardic habit. It came with the Sephardic Jews from Spain, it's hard to find done properly anywhere else in Turkey, and it's now a registered geographical indication of İzmir.

Alsancak Dostlar Fırını, a bakery on Kıbrıs Şehitleri Caddesi since 1983, opens around 6am and is the famous one. Nearby, Zeynel Ergin's wood-fired bakery on 1466 Sokak, in an old Greek house, sells gevrek, which is what İzmir insists on calling a simit, the sesame bread ring, still warm.

A ten-minute walk away is the old Tekel tobacco factory, which reopened in 2023 as the İzmir Culture and Art Factory. It's now the home of the city's archaeology and ethnography collections, moved here from their old buildings, and the best single place to understand the region: finds from Smyrna and the Ionian cities along the coast, and Ottoman İzmir's costumes, crafts and kitchens.

The rest of the complex is a painting and sculpture museum and a garden that's pleasant for a coffee afterwards.

Spend the early afternoon wandering. The side streets around Kıbrıs Şehitleri Caddesi are what's left of the Levantine and Greek town that the fire of 1922 didn't reach: two-storey stone houses with bay windows and wrought-iron balconies, most now bars, cafés and shops. Alsancak station at the northern end, opened in 1858 for the British-owned İzmir-Aydın railway, is one of the oldest in Anatolia.

Then walk down to the Kordon for the Atatürk Museum, the 19th-century merchant's house where Mustafa Kemal Atatürk stayed on his visits to the city. Just south of it is Gündoğdu Square, where İzmir gathers for concerts, protests and New Year's Eve.

Walk inland to Kültürpark, the big green park in the middle of the city. Look at the map and you'll notice it's exactly where the Armenian and Greek quarters used to be. The Turkish army entered İzmir on 9 September 1922, at the end of the Greco-Turkish war, and on 13 September a fire broke out that burned for days and destroyed most of the Armenian, Greek and European parts of the city. Thousands died, and hundreds of thousands of refugees crowded the Kordon waiting for ships. Who started it is still disputed: most Western historians blame Turkish soldiers and irregulars, while the official Turkish account blames Armenian and Greek arsonists. The 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey followed, a story told in our piece on who the modern Greeks are.

The mayor Behçet Uz laid out the park on the burned ground in 1936, and it has been the home of the İzmir International Fair, first held in 1927, ever since. Today it's the city's lungs: shaded paths, a lake, the 1937 Parachute Tower and an open-air theatre. On 9 September you'll see why the date matters to locals: the city celebrates it as Liberation Day.

Leave the park by the western gate and walk towards Cumhuriyet Square to find the Church of St. Polycarp, the oldest working church in İzmir, first built in the 1620s under French protection and dedicated to the martyr you met on Kadifekale. Raymond Charles Péré, the architect of the Clock Tower, painted the scenes of Polycarp's life inside, and the whole thing is much more lavish than the plain courtyard suggests. The opening hours are short and irregular, so if the gate is closed, admire it from the courtyard and don't lose sleep over it.

Cumhuriyet Square itself, with its 1932 equestrian statue of Atatürk looking out to sea, is a short stroll away.

At night, Alsancak is where İzmir goes out. The lanes off Kıbrıs Şehitleri Caddesi fill with people drinking beer on low stools outside tiny bars, and it stays loud until late. Beer here means Efes, brewed in İzmir since 1969, but there's a small craft scene too: Madame Prokopp, which opened at the end of 2024 with around 30 beers on tap and bottled, and La Puerta, a long-running bar on 1469 Sokak.

For something more İzmir, book a table at Meyhane Endülüs, a meyhane (tavern) where a fasıl band plays old Turkish songs every night except Sunday and the whole room sings along by the second bottle of rakı.

Ephesus was one of the great cities of the Roman Empire, a port of perhaps a couple of hundred thousand people before its harbor silted up and the sea moved away. Walking down from the upper gate, you pass the town hall, fountains and shops along Curetes Street, a marble road still worn smooth by feet, and then the view opens onto the Library of Celsus. It was built in the early 2nd century by a consul's son as a library and monument for his father, who still lies in a sarcophagus under the floor, and is thought to have held around 12,000 scrolls. Its facade was put back together by Austrian archaeologists in the 1970s.

Beyond it, the Great Theatre, dug into the hillside, held around 25,000 people. According to the Acts of the Apostles, it's where the silversmiths of Ephesus rioted against Saint Paul, whose preaching was bad for the business in little statues of Artemis.

Just before the library, a separate ticket gets you under a huge roof into the Terrace Houses (9am to 5pm), where the rich of Ephesus lived on the slope above Curetes Street. This is the part most visitors skip and shouldn't. The houses have their mosaic floors and painted walls still in place, and walkways take you through them room by room, so you see how Roman families actually lived, not just where they shopped and prayed. It's also cool and shaded, which by 11am you'll appreciate.

Walk or take a taxi back into Selçuk for lunch. Selçuk Köftecisi, run by the same family since 1959, does grilled köfte and lamb çöp şiş, and it's where the town itself eats. Sit in the shade and rest your legs.

On the edge of Selçuk, a single column stands in a marshy field. That's all that's left of the Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, bigger than the Parthenon in its day. A man named Herostratus burned an earlier version in 356 BC purely to make his name famous, and legend adds that it happened on the night Alexander the Great was born. The column was pieced together from fragments of different columns in 1973, and carved column drums from the temple ended up in the British Museum.

From the field you can see the hill above town, where the Basilica of St. John stands over the grave the apostle is said to lie in. The emperor Justinian built it in the 6th century, and even as a ruin its scale is enormous. Below it is the İsa Bey Mosque of 1375, one of the finest early Turkish mosques in Anatolia. The Ephesus Museum in the center of Selçuk holds the statues of Artemis found in the city, if you still have energy. Pilgrims also head 7 km up the mountain to the House of the Virgin Mary, where several popes have prayed. Identified in the 1880s from a German nun's visions, it's a place of faith rather than history, and a taxi there and back takes a couple of hours.

Minibuses (dolmuş) climb 8 km into the hills from Selçuk to Şirince, a village of white houses on a green slope that was Greek until the population exchange of 1923. It used to be called Çirkince, roughly "ugly", and was renamed Şirince, "pleasant", in 1926. The Greek families left, Muslim families from the Kavala area moved into their houses in 1924, and the village kept the Greeks' habit of making wine, today mostly from fruit: blackberry, peach, pomegranate, melon.

It's touristy in the middle and lovely at the edges. Walk up past the two old churches, then taste a few fruit wines at Şirince Artemis, a restaurant and wine house in the old village school of 1906, before heading back down to Selçuk for the train.

Among the apartment blocks of Bayraklı is a small mound called Tepekule, and on it the remains of Old Smyrna, the city before the city. People lived on the mound from at least the 3rd millennium BC. Aeolian Greeks founded a town here around 1000 BC, Ionians from Colophon took it over in the early 7th century BC, and it became a walled city with one of the oldest temples to Athena in Anatolia. Tradition says Homer was born beside the nearby Meles stream, which is why İzmir claims him. The Lydian king Alyattes destroyed the town around 600 BC, and three centuries later the new Smyrna was built across the bay on Mount Pagos, where you stood on day two.

It's a modest site of low walls and foundations, not Ephesus. Come for the story and the idea of standing where the whole history of the city begins.

From Bayraklı it's a short taxi or bus ride west to Karşıyaka, "the opposite shore", a city within the city with its own proud identity, its own basketball team and its own rivalry with everyone on the other side. Its çarşı, the long pedestrian market street that runs inland from the ferry pier, is where the district shops, eats and gossips.

Near the upper end is the tomb of Zübeyde Hanım, Atatürk's mother, who died in İzmir in January 1923 and is buried here, a place many Turkish visitors make a point of stopping at.

Take the waterfront tram or walk west along the shore to Bostanlı, and have a second round of kumru, the sausage-and-cheese sandwich from day two. The version here comes from the same tradition, and Kumrucu Şevki, which started in Bostanlı in 1972 and now has branches all over the city, is where many locals would tell you to try it.

At the mouth of the Bostanlı stream, the city built a set of stepped wooden decks and a footbridge right on the water in 2016, and they've become the north shore's favorite place for sunset. From here the sun goes down over the gulf with the whole city opposite you: the Clock Tower's neighborhood, Kadifekale, the Asansör's cliff. Bring something to drink, find a step and stay until the lights come on across the water.

For the last dinner, stay in Bostanlı, which has a younger, more relaxed meyhane scene than the Kordon. Bostanlı Meyhanesi has been pouring rakı since 1997, and the fish restaurants near the pier are packed on weekend nights. Order a few meze, fish of the day and one more round than you meant to.

Then walk to the Bostanlı pier and take an İzdeniz ferry back to Konak. It's the same ticket as a bus, and the crossing takes well under half an hour, with the city's lights spread along the water in front of you. Do what the commuters do: buy a tea from the counter on board and sit on the open deck. It's the best way to leave İzmir, even if you're only going back to your hotel.