Antalya

Antalya is the old Attaleia, founded by Attalus II of Pergamon around 150 BC, a walled port on the southern coast where the Taurus meets the sea. The Seljuks took it in the early 13th century, and from 1321 it was the capital of the Teke beylik. When Ibn Battuta visited in the 1330s he found a vast, populous city whose communities lived in separate walled quarters: Christian merchants in the port, Greeks, Jews, and the ruler's court with his Mamluks. Dried apricots called Qamar ad-Din were sent from its orchards to Egypt.

In August 1361 Peter I of Cyprus took Antalya by storm. The Teke bey Mehmed cut off food to the Cypriots, allied with the Karamanids and besieged the city in vain the next year, then retook it in 1373. Bayezid I seized it in 1390, and the Ottomans held it for good from 1423. Later Evliya Çelebi counted three thousand houses in twenty Turkish and four Greek quarters, with up to two hundred boats in the port.