Aydın, Turkey — Towns & Travel Guide

What is Aydın known for?

Figs made Aydın's name. The province grows most of Turkey's dried figs, and the orchards around Germencik carry a reputation that reaches buyers far beyond the Aegean coast. Olives, cotton and chestnuts fill the rest of the Büyük Menderes plain.

Two very different draws pull travellers here. Kuşadası and Didim line the coast with beaches and cruise berths, while the marble city of Aphrodisias lies inland among Roman streets in the Karacasu hills.

Where is Aydın?

Aydın lies in the Aegean Region of Turkey, filling the lower valley of the Büyük Menderes River. The river is its spine. It runs west out of the highlands and crosses a broad, flat plain before reaching the sea, and this alluvial corridor is what made the land so fertile.

The Aydın Mountains, the ancient Mesogis, wall the valley to the north. Higher country rises toward Muğla in the south. Between the two ranges the plain is wide and green, planted with fig and olive groves the whole way down.

At its western end the province meets the Aegean Sea. Here the Büyük Menderes has built a marshy delta, and Lake Bafa lies behind it, an old arm of the sea that silt long ago sealed off. The coast breaks into headlands and bays around Kuşadası and the Dilek Peninsula, then runs south past Didim. İzmir lies to the north, Denizli inland to the east, and Muğla to the south.

Aydın itself, the provincial capital, stands well inland in the middle of the valley, roughly halfway between the mountains and the shore. Söke and Nazilli anchor the delta and the upper valley. The sea is never the whole story here; the plain is.

What is Aydın like?

The figure that stands over Aydın's culture is the efe, the mustachioed warrior-dancer of the Aegean uplands. His slow, arms-wide dance is the zeybek. The central district of the province carries the name Efeler in his honour.

Efes were irregular fighters and village strongmen, and several of them, Yörük Ali Efe above all, became guerrilla leaders in the Turkish War of Independence. It survives at weddings and village festivals, stamped out to the beat of the davul and the wail of the zurna. The step is deliberate and upright.

Everyday life still turns on the land. The fig harvest sets the late-summer rhythm, and Aegean cooking here leans on olive oil, wild greens and the province's own produce. A short local song is even a regional saying; to tell someone to keep it brief, people say to make it an Aydın tune.

Underneath all of this runs a deep classical layer. Aphrodisias ran a noted school of marble sculpture in Roman times, the ruins of ancient Tralles lie under Aydın itself, and Nysa clings to a ravine above Sultanhisar. History here is thick on the ground.

What is the history of Aydın?

Aydın takes its name from a medieval Turkish dynasty. Long before that the valley was Greek and then Roman ground, and cities like Tralles, Priene and Miletus grew wealthy on the trade of the Büyük Menderes and the Aegean ports. Aphrodisias made its fortune in marble.

The Aydınid beylik, one of the Turkoman principalities that rose from the wreck of Seljuk rule in the 14th century, gave both the province and its capital their present name. Ottoman rule followed, and the railway up the valley later tied the fig country to the port at İzmir.

What is the climate of Aydın?

The Büyük Menderes valley bakes in summer. Aydın sits in a hot-summer Mediterranean belt, and the inland plain, boxed in by the Aydın Mountains, ranks among the hottest corners of the Turkish Aegean in high summer. The rains come in winter.

Most of the year's rain falls between October and March, which leaves the fig and olive harvest to ripen under a dry, cloudless late summer. The coast at Kuşadası and Didim stays a touch cooler, tempered by the breeze off the Aegean Sea.

How do you get to Aydın?

Most visitors reach Aydın through İzmir. The nearest large airport is İzmir Adnan Menderes, north of the province, and from there the old İzmir-to-Aydın railway and the coastal highway both run down the Büyük Menderes valley to the capital. Trains from İzmir call at Söke and Nazilli too.

Kuşadası has its own way in. Cruise ships tie up at its harbour through the season, and travellers bound for Didim in the south often fly instead into Bodrum-Milas, over the border in Muğla.