Erdek and Cyzikus -- the ups and downs of history on the Kapidağ Penninsula

Not that it matters, though, because less than an hour's drive away from the sprawling, ugly port town on the southern side of the Sea of Marmara is the small and undervalued seaside resort of Erdek, a much nicer place to pass the night.

Erdek sits at the edge of the Kapıdağ Peninsula, where a series of small settlements ring a mountain known to the ancients as Mt. Dindymus (782 meters). Hard though it may now be to believe, there was a time when the mega resorts of Bodrum, Marmaris and Kuşadası were just small fishing villages, quietly minding their own business in the sun. Nowadays it hardly merits a mention in the same breath, but at that time Erdek was the in place, a fashionable hideaway conveniently close to İstanbul to which the then equivalent of the “Hello!” crowd flocked for their holidays. The Pınar Otel was the particular hot spot, a favorite with industrialist Rahmi Koç. Then hard times hit, and as you arrive at the aging bus station today you may well wonder what you're letting yourself in for. But once you get down to the waterfront, you'll soon feel time rolling backwards and the ghosts of the past crowding in on you.

Today Erdek lives primarily for the ferries that connect it with the Marmara Islands, but for the brief months of the school holidays it girds itself up again like an aging aunt waiting to host her bayram guests. Unlike many other Turkish resorts, it hasn't succumbed to the lure of either the super high-rise hotels or the serried ranks of cookie-cutter summer houses. Instead a series of relatively discreet hotels are strung out along a palm-lined promenade popular with cyclists and mercifully closed to cars. Many of the hotels date back to the glory days of the '60s, a fact unfortunately reflected in their fixtures and fittings, but most feature balconies offering billion-dollar views of the sun slowly lowering itself into the sea at day's end, which for many people will go a long way to compensate for a badly stained carpet or a bathroom sink sans hot water.

Erdek is a small place with not much in the way of entertainment. The beach is a mixture of coarse sand and shingle, dotted with beach brollies that go easy on the eye by avoiding advertising. There's a pretty, small fishing harbor overlooking the offshore island of Zeytinli, which is home to a research institute dedicated to olives. The most obvious excursions are to the nearby Marmara Islands, with the ferries stopping at Marmara (the largest), Avşa (the liveliest) and Paşalimanı (the least developed).

Otherwise you might want to visit the ruins of ancient Cyzikus, just off the road back towards Bandırma. This is a truly melancholy site, a place to come to ponder the curious twists taken by the wheel of fate. Almost nothing now survives of what was once a huge town, bar the stepped base of a temple and a vast quantity of glistening white marble. However, if you inspect those marble fragments more closely, you will begin to realize that there must once have been more to this place than meets the modern eye.

Sure enough, the history books have a lot to say about Cyzikus, comparing it in importance to such illustrious sites as Ephesus and Byzantium. Originally what is now the Kapıdağ Peninsula was an island known as Arctonessus (Bear Island). At the strategic point where it could be linked to the mainland with bridges, Cyzikus was apparently founded by colonists from Miletus in 756 B.C. who returned to re-found it in 675 B.C. According to Greek mythology, Jason and the Argonauts arrived here during their search for the famous Golden Fleece. Later, the Cyzikans made a name for themselves by developing an early form of coinage which they marketed to the Athenians.

Sitting on the steps of the abandoned temple, it's even harder to imagine that this part of Turkey once belonged to the Persian Empire than it is to believe that Erdek was a favorite of the jet set, but Cyzikus wisely refused to join the other Greek city states in rising up against the Persian overlords, thereby saving itself from the destruction meted out to the rebels in 494 B.C. The records show that Cyzikus was the biggest local tributary of Persia, a clear indication of its size and importance, which was later cemented by an alliance with the rising power of the Pergamene kings based in what is now Bergama. King Attalus I of Pergamum even married a Cyzikan woman called Apollonis in whose name her sons later built the first known temple on this site.

In Roman times Cyzikus was still an important city, visited by the Emperor Hadrian in 124. At once he ordered the construction of a temple to himself which was completed during the reign of his successor Aurelius in 167. This temple, whose wretched base is almost all that remains today, was at the time the largest in Asia Minor and went on to supplant the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus in some people's lists of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.

But no matter how big and powerful it was, even Cyzikus was eventually destined to fall. In 673 it was captured by Arab raiders who used it as a base for attacks on Constantinople (İstanbul). Then came a series of ruinous earthquakes, after which the Selçuks snatched the city from its Byzantine rulers. In 1092 the Byzantines recovered the city, only to lose it again in 1204 when the Fourth Crusade took its disastrous side step into Constantinople. By the time the Byzantines managed to drive the Latins out again in 1268 there was virtually nothing left to show for all that remarkable history. Much of the great temple of Hadrian was still standing well into the 15th century, but it was just too tempting a source of building material to be left alone. By 1837 a Western traveler was already describing the site as “a heap of ruins”; the mystery is what ultimately became of all the stones since there's precious little sign of them anywhere in the vicinity now.

Erdek, too, was originally founded by the Miletians, who called it Artace. However, ruled by less wily individuals than Cyzikus, it sided with the Greeks against the Persians in 499 B.C., for which sin it was razed to the ground in 494 B.C. Ultimately, though, it was Erdek that was to have the last laugh since Cyzikus never rose again, whereas Erdek found new life in the 20th century. Today there's a small open-air museum near the ferry terminal which displays chunks of marble masonry from Cyzikus, including some impressive lion-head water spouts. It's a nice idea, but sadly the taggers have already been at work, mindlessly scrawling their names on the silent reminders of a history dating back 2,500 years.

How to get there

İDO (www.ido.com.tr) runs three ferries a day from Yenikapı in İstanbul to Bandırma. Buses wait across the road to take you to the Bandırma bus terminal from where there are three buses per hour to Erdek. These pass the short path leading

to the Cyzikus ruins.

Where to stay

Most Erdek hotels will open for Kurban Bayramı, then close for the winter.

Atay Otel: 0266 835 25 00

Hotel Acet: 0266 835 65 72

Hotel Alevok: 0266 835 11 16

Pınar Hotel: 0266 855 70 24