Chapter 9 - Bodrum, Turkey

Bodrum is a city on Turkey's southwest coast on the Aegean Sea. We hadn’t heard much about Bodrum until we detoured here.

It is a beautiful seaport that rivals the destinations we visited in Greece in every way. It’s tropical, has sandy beaches, Greek windmills up on the hills, and the requisite medieval castle.

Good morning Bodrum!

We’re here just in time for the Bodrum Cup, an annual international yacht race. We can see the preliminaries from our stateroom.

We also enjoyed really good, strong, Turkish coffee!

Again, we usually research our destinations before we travel, but we had to learn about Bodrum just before we got here. So here’s the history lesson. It was founded by the Greeks and known in ancient times as Halicarnassus. The wife of the ruler, Mausolus, build him a tomb, around 353 BC, which became, you guessed it, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. The medieval castle was built in part using the stone from the by then destroyed Mausoleum of Halicarnassus. And now you know where the word mausoleum comes from. End of lesson.

We came upon a statue of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in a city square and so looked him up as well. He was the founder of the official ideology of the Republic of Turkey in 1923. Kemalism embraced secularism, state support of the sciences, free education, and gender equality. Yes, this is 1923!

“I do not leave any verses, any dogmas, nor any frozen and moulded principles as spiritual heritage. My spiritual heritage is science and reason.”
— Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

Pretty cool guy!

We will be reading a lot more about Turkey after we get home.