Once a picturesque fishing village, Marmaris is now a grown-up town which exceeds Muğla, the provincial capital, in size. This is a place to come if you like your holidays loud and lively. At one time, Marmaris was said to have more than 3,000 restaurants. This is not somewhere you can expect to get bored.
Marmaris has an unbeatable natural setting, its harbor backed by mountains and surrounded by forests. Unfortunately, history has been less kind to it; apart from the tiny castle, built for Sultan Süleyman tha Magnificent’s conquest of Rhodes, and the quaint streets leading up to it, together with an inland rock studded with tombs, almost nothing remains of old Marmaris, making this somewhere for vacationers, who play for today, rather than hankering after times gone by.
Söğüt, Çiftlik Köyü, Bozburun, Orhaniye, İçmeler, Armutalan, Selimiye, Bayırköy, Turgut, Turunç, Kumlubük, Çubucak, İnbükü… Marmaris is vast. Much like a metropolis, it can’t be squeezed into two short pages. Think of this as a “sneak-preview”. Each bay or village should be the subject of another article.
Every year, sees the bazaar in the town center grow that bit larger. Where once it was mostly undercover, now it flows out into the surrounding streets, selling an astonishing array of goods, almost entirely aimed at tourists.
An outsize harbor
In the annals of Byzantine historian Doukas, Marmaris was mentioned as a Carian port. The modern town still boasts a flash marina, although nowadays the traders have given away to yachties and day trippers. How many of them know, though, that the harbor is big enough to have accommodated a fleet of more than 700 ships in 1522, when Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent arrived at the head of 140,000 troops for the siege of Rhodes? Or that the British Admiral Nelson holed up here, when he was preparing to try and drive the French out of Egypt in 1798?
Bars and restaurants
As befits such a busy place, Marmaris is overflowing with restaurants, more than 3,000 of them according to one recent count. Most of them sell Turkish staples although there are also “Indian” and “Chinese” restaurants to suit the palates of the largely British clientele. The most picturesque settings are round the harbor, where you can eat your meals while watching the sunset. Don’t expect the prices to be anything other than tourist-oriented, though.
Nor is there any shortage of bars, with most of them tucked into what is generally known as Barlar Sokağı (Bar St), one street back from the harbor. The “day” doesn’t kick off until around midnight here!
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