Balat

Balat stands among the remains of Miletus, the great ancient Ionian city near the mouth of the Maeander. Once a great maritime centre, Miletus founded colonies around the Black Sea and produced philosophers whose ideas travelled far beyond its harbour. As the river deposited silt, the old coastline changed, leaving the city's monuments amid the plain.

In the later Middle Ages Balat became a centre of the Menteşe principality. İlyas Bey built a mosque and endowed a complex here in the early fifteenth century, when the town served as the dynasty's last capital. The mosque, madrasa and baths rose among ancient remains, and old water pipes beneath the site may still have been used. Carved marble and carefully worked stone gave the mosque a splendour suited to its patron. Its decorated mihrab marked the direction of prayer inside the domed hall, while the adjoining baths and school made the foundation more than a place of worship.

Merchants knew Balat as an important place of exchange on the western Anatolian coast, even as the ever changing river and harbour altered the landscape around it. The buildings of the Menteşe rulers joined the theatre, walls and other remains of Miletus, leaving successive layers of the city's history visible in the same plain.