Afyonkarahisar Province
Afyonkarahisar Province called more Afyon Province, is a province in western Turkey. Adjacent provinces are Kütahya to the northwest, Uşak to the west, Denizli to the southwest, Burdur to the south, Isparta to the southeast, Konya to the east, Eskişehir to the north; the provincial capital is Afyonkarahisar. It covers an area of 14.230 km², the population is about 706.371. Afyonkarahisar province is divided into 18 districts: Afyonkarahisar Başmakçı Bayat Bolvadin Çay Çobanlar Dazkırı Dinar Emirdağ Evciler Hocalar İhsaniye İscehisar Kızılören Sandıklı Sinanpaşa Sultandağı Şuhut Media related to Afyonkarahisar Province at Wikimedia Commons Afyonkarahisar governor's official website Afyonkarahisar municipality's official website Pictures of the capital of Afyonkarahisar province. With old Fortress of Opium, nice old centre. Https://web.archive.org/web/20060622072815/http://www.turkeyforecast.com/weather/afyon/
Dalaman
Dalaman is a district, as well as the central town of that district, situated on the southwestern coast of Turkey, in the Muğla Province. Dalaman Stream forms much of the western border of the district, where its neighbors are Köyceğiz and Ortaca districts; the town of Dalaman is located in the coastal plain, whereas the rest of the district – towards Fethiye district on the coast and towards the high mountains on the northern border to Denizli Province – is upland, dominated by the valleys of the Dalaman Stream's eastern tributaries. Dalaman Airport is 5 km south of the town. Apart from aviation activities, Dalaman plays host to one of Turkey's biggest open prisons where less dangerous prisoners are sent as part of their rehabilitation programme. A state farm is present in Dalaman. Agriculture citrus fruits, plays an important role in the local economy, since it is situated in a fertile plain at sea level. Dalaman Airport serves as a gateway to the tourists who visit this part of Turkey every year, heading to seaside resorts to the west and east of Dalaman such as Marmaris, Fethiye, Köyceğiz, Dalyan, Ölüdeniz, Hisarönü and Dalaman itself.
Dalaman Airport is small in comparison to other airports in Turkey, has parking spaces for 14 jet aircraft and is served by many operators. Turkish Airlines offer daily flights to Turkey's financial capital Istanbul; the Airport serves as a seasonal base for other airlines notably Onur Air, Pegasus Airlines and Free Bird Airlines. A new international airport terminal has been opened. In 1906, the Alexandria railway station was built by mistake in Dalaman; the building still serves today as the headquarters of the state farm. The year before the construction, Abbas Hilmi Pasha had acquired a large part of the fertile plain and had decided to set up a plantation in the region, he had ordered the plans and the material for his projected residence here to his architects in France, at the same as the plans and the material for a railway station for Alexandria in Egypt. The two simultaneous shipments were misdirected, the materials for his residence heading towards Egypt, those for the Alexandria railway station ending up in Dalaman.
Since it was going to be too costly to re-ship everything to the right destination, the station was built in Dalaman anyway, with a few kilometers of purposeless railway track. Dalaman has a hot Mediterranean climate. Summers are dry whilst winters are short and cool. Dalaman is a sunny place throughout the whole of the year in June and July. Dalaman holds the record for the highest recorded air temperature in Turkey. Dalaman Airport official website Interactive Virtual Tour of Dalaman Area
Coffeehouse
A coffeehouse, coffee shop, or café is an establishment that serves coffee, related coffee drinks, – depending on country – other drinks including alcoholic. Some coffeehouses may serve cold drinks such as iced tea. A coffeehouse may serve some type of food, such as light snacks, muffins or other pastries. Coffeehouses range from owner-operated small businesses to large multinational corporations. While café may refer to a coffeehouse, the term "cafe" refers to a diner, British cafe, "greasy spoon", transport cafe, teahouse or tea room, or other casual eating and drinking place. A coffeehouse may share some of the same characteristics of a bar or restaurant, but it is different from a cafeteria. Many coffeehouses in the Middle East and in West Asian immigrant districts in the Western world offer shisha, flavored tobacco smoked through a hookah. Espresso bars are a type of coffeehouse that specializes in serving espresso and espresso-based drinks. From a cultural standpoint, coffeehouses serve as centers of social interaction: the coffeehouse provides patrons with a place to congregate, read, entertain one another, or pass the time, whether individually or in small groups.
Since the development of Wi-Fi, coffeehouses with this capability have become places for patrons to access the Internet on their laptops and tablet computers. A coffeehouse can serve as an informal club for its regular members; as early as the 1950s Beatnik era and the 1960s folk music scene, coffeehouses have hosted singer-songwriter performances in the evening. The most common English spelling, café, is the French and Spanish spelling, was adopted by English-speaking countries in the late-19th century; as English makes little use of diacritics, anglicisation tends to omit them and to place the onus on the readers to remember how it is pronounced without the presence of the accent. Thus the spelling cafe has become common in English-language usage throughout the world for the less formal, i.e. "greasy spoon" variety. The Italian spelling, caffè, is sometimes used in English. In southern England around London in the 1950s, the French pronunciation was facetiously altered to and spelt caff; the English words coffee and café derive from the Italian word for coffee, caffè—first attested as caveé in Venice in 1570—and in turn derived from Arabic qahwa.
The Arabic term qahwa referred to a type of wine, but after the wine ban by Islam, the name was transferred to coffee because of the similar rousing effect it induced. European knowledge of coffee came through European contact with Turkey via Venetian-Ottoman trade relations; the English word café to describe a restaurant that serves coffee and snacks rather than the word coffee that describes the drink, is derived from the French café. The first café is believed to have opened in France in 1660; the translingual word root /kafe/ appears in many European languages with various naturalized spellings, including. Coffeehouses in Mecca became a concern of imams who viewed them as places for political gatherings and drinking, they were banned for Muslims between 1512 and 1524. The Ottoman chronicler İbrahim Peçevi reports in his writings about the opening of the first coffeehouse in Istanbul: Until the year 962, in the High, God-Guarded city of Constantinople, as well as in Ottoman lands coffee and coffee-houses did not exist.
About that year, a fellow called Hakam from Aleppo and a wag called Shams from Damascus came to the city. Various legends involving the introduction of coffee to Istanbul at a "Kiva Han" in the late-15th century circulate in culinary tradition, but with no documentation; the 17th century French traveler and writer Jean Chardin gave a lively description of the Persian coffeehouse scene: People engage in conversation, for it is there that news is communicated and where those interested in politics criticize the government in all freedom and without being fearful, since the government does not heed what the people say. Innocent games... resembling checkers and chess, are played. In addition, mollas and poets take turns telling stories in verse or in prose; the narrations by the mollas and the dervishes are moral lessons, like our sermons, but it is not considered scandalous not to pay attention to them. No one is forced to give up his conversation because of it. A molla will stand up in the middle, or at one end of the qahveh-khaneh, begin to preach in a loud voice, or a dervish enters all of a sudden, chastises the assembled on the vanity of the world and its material goods.
It happens that two or three people talk at the same time, one on one side, the other on the opposite, sometimes one will be a preacher and the other a storyteller. In the 17th century, coffee appeared for the first time in Europe outside the Ottoman Empire, coffeehouses were established, soon becoming popular; the first coffeehouses appeared in Venice in 1629, due to the traffic between La Serenissima and the Ottomans. The first coffeehouse in England was set up in Oxford in 1650 by a Jewish man named Jacob at the Angel in the parish of St Peter in
Köyceğiz
Köyceğiz is a town and district of Muğla Province in the Aegean region of Turkey. The town of Köyceğiz lies at the northern end of a lake of the same name, joined to the Mediterranean Sea by a natural channel called Dalyan Delta, its unique environment is being preserved as a nature and wildlife sanctuary, the Köyceğiz-Dalyan Special Environmental Protection Area. A road shaded with trees leads to the township that carries the same name as the river, situated on the inland waterway and is -administratively- a part of the neighboring district of Ortaca. Dalyan is popular with visitors and its maze of channels is explored by boat; the restaurants which line the waterways specialize in fresh fish. High on the cliff face, at a bend in the river, above the ancient harbor city of Caunos, tombs were carved into the rocks; the Dalyan Delta, with a long, golden sandy beach at its mouth, is a nature conservation area and a refuge for rare loggerhead sea turtles and blue crabs. District municipality's official website Köyceğiz Pictures
Muğla
Muğla is a city in south-western Turkey. Prior to 1923, 3000 Greeks lived in the city's Smyrna district. Today Muğla is the center of the district of the same name, as well as of Muğla Province, which stretches along Turkey's Aegean coast. Muğla's center is situated inland at an altitude of 660 m and lies at a distance of about 30 km from the nearest seacoast in the Gulf of Gökova to its south-west. Muğla district area neighbors the district areas of Milas, Yatağan and Kavaklıdere to its north by north-west and those of Ula and Köyceğiz, all of whom are dependent districts. Muğla is the administrative capital of a province that incorporates internationally well-known and popular tourist resorts such as Bodrum and Fethiye and the smaller resort of Sarigerme The district area's physical features are determined by several pot-shaped high plains abbreviated by mountains, of which the largest is the one where the city of Muğla is located and, called under the same name, it is surrounded by slopes denuded of soil, paved with calcerous formations and a scrub cover which gives the immediate vicinity of Muğla a barren look uncharacteristic for its region.
Arable land is restricted to valley bottoms. A small city of 61,550 and overlooked by visitors to nearby coastal resorts, Muğla received a new boost with the foundation of Muğla University in the 1990s. Today, the university brings together a student community of 16,000 and, added by its academia and staff, it played a key role in bringing movement to the city and in opening it to the outside world, its former profile as a predominantly rural, difficult to access and underpopulated region enclosed by a rugged mountainous complex is now coming to an end. In recent years, a major program of restoration of the city's architectural heritage has enhanced local tourism; the city remains an orderly and leafy provincial center, which kept its old neighborhoods without surrendering to a boom in concrete constructions, but displays a progressive mind as exemplified by the pride still expressed at having had Turkey's first female provincial governor in the 1990s, Ms. Lale Aytaman. Muğla still lacks sizeable manufacturing and processing centers and relies on trade, services and agriculture in its economy.
In ancient times, Muğla was a rather insignificant settlement halfway on the passage between the Carian cities of Idrias to the north and Idyma to the southwest on the coast. The indigenous name Mobolla, over time corrupted into "Mogolla" and further into the modern "Muğla", appears for the first time in the beginning of the 2nd century BC at the time of its region's passage from what was an eastern Carian federation linked with Taba and other cities to Rhodian domination. Mobolla was part of the Rhodian Peraea on a firm basis as of 167 BC until at least the 2nd century AD; the Rhodian territory started here and while region was subject to Rhodes, it was not incorporated in the Rhodian state. There are no ruins to reveal the history of the settlement of Mobolla. On the high hill to the north of the city, a few ancient remains indicate that it was the site of an acropolis. A handful of inscriptions were unearthed within the city itself and they date back to the 2nd century BCE. Turkish-era Muğla remained a minor site in the beginning despite having been captured early for western Anatolia in the course of the 13th century.
The local ruling dynasty of Menteşe had their capital in Milas. Muğla acquired regional importance after it replaced Milas as the seat of the subprovince under the Ottoman Empire in 1420; the sanjak kept the name Menteşe until the Republican Era, when it was renamed Muğla after its seat of government. In 2018, archaeological ruins and mosaics discovered in the city have been confirmed to belong to the villa of the Greek fisherman Phainos who lived in the 2nd century AD. Phainos was the most famous fisherman of his time. Muğla has a Mediterranean Climate, it is characterised by long and dry summers with cool and wet winters. Although it is close to major resorts, Muğla has only begun to attract visitors. Sights of interest in the city include: Great Mosque of Muğla - large mosque built in 1344 by the Beys of Menteşe Konakaltı Han and Yağcılar Han - restored 18th century caravanserais, the first used as an art gallery and facing Muğla Museum, the second used for more commercial purposes Kurşunlu Cami - large mosque built in 1495 Muğla City Museum has a good collection of archaeological and ethnographical artefacts, as well as 9 million years old animal and plant fossiles discovered in Kaklıcatepe nearby the Ottoman Empire-era bazaar - marked by a clock tower built by a Greek craftsman named Filivari Usta in 1895 Vakıflar Hamam - a still operating Turkish bath which dates back to 1258The old quarter of Muğla - on the slopes and around Saburhane Square, consisting of about four hundred registered old houses dating from the 18th and 19th centuries, many of which are restored.
These houses are in the Turkish/Ottoman style, characterized by hayat sections accessed through double-shuttered doors called kuzulu kapı and dotted with chimneys typical of Muğla. But there are a number of "Greek" houses; the differences between the two types of houses may have as much to do with the extent to which wood or stone were used in their architecture, whether they were arranged in introverted or extraverted styles, as with who inhabited them previously. Local students tend to hang out in open air cafés along the İzmir highway or in the caravanserai or in Sanat Evi, a
Yatağan power station
Yatağan Thermal Power Plant is a coal-fired power station in Yatağan, Muğla in western Turkey. Owned by indebted Bereket Enerji it has a 120m chimney. Yatağan thermal power plant consumes 5.4 million tons of coal and can produce 3,780 MWh annually, the least productive power station in Turkey. 2 workers were killed in 2018 and the plant's safety has been criticized by the Chamber of Engineers. In 2018 the plant received 70 million lira capacity payments. "Yatağan power station" on CoalSwarm
Bodrum
Bodrum is a district and a port city in Muğla Province, in the southwestern Aegean Region of Turkey. It is located on the southern coast of Bodrum Peninsula, at a point that checks the entry into the Gulf of Gökova, is the center of the eponymous district; the city was called Halicarnassus of Caria in ancient times and was famous for housing the Mausoleum of Mausolus, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Built by the Knights Hospitaller in the 15th century, Bodrum Castle overlooks the harbour and the marina; the castle includes a museum of underwater archaeology and hosts several cultural festivals throughout the year. The city had a population of 36,317 in 2012, it takes 50 minutes via boat to reach Kos from Bodrum, with services running multiple times a day by at least three operators. In classical antiquity Bodrum was known as a major city in ancient Caria; the modern name Bodrum derives from the town's medieval name Petronium, which has its roots in the Hospitaller Castle of St. Peter.
Bodrum has a hot-summer Mediterranean climate. Winter average is around 15 °C and in the summer 34 °C, with sunny spells. Summers are hot and sunny and winters are mild and humid. "Average swimming pool and sea temperatures for Bodrum". BodrumBulletin. Retrieved 1 March 2015. Halicarnassus was an ancient Greek city at the site of modern Bodrum in Turkey. Halicarnassus was founded by Dorian Greeks, the figures on its coins, such as the head of Medusa, Athena or Poseidon, or the trident, support the statement that the mother cities were Troezen and Argos; the inhabitants appear to have accepted Anthes, a son of Poseidon, as their legendary founder, as mentioned by Strabo, were proud of the title of Antheadae. The Carian name for Halicarnassus has been tentatively identified with Alosδkarnosδ in inscriptions. At an early period Halicarnassus was a member of the Doric Hexapolis, which included Kos, Lindos and Ialysus. In the early 5th century Halicarnassus was under the sway of Artemisia I of Caria, who made herself famous as a naval commander at the battle of Salamis.
Of Pisindalis, her son and successor, little is known. The city fell under Persian rule. Under the Persians, it was the capital city of the satrapy of Caria, the region that had since long constituted its hinterland and of which it was the principal port, its strategic location ensured. Archaeological evidence from the period such as the discovered Salmakis Inscription, now in Bodrum Museum of Underwater Archaeology, attest to the particular pride its inhabitants had developed. Alexander the Great laid siege to the city after his arrival in Carian lands and, together with his ally, the queen Ada of Caria, captured it after fighting in 334 BCE. Mausolus ruled Caria from here, nominally on behalf of the Persians and independently in practical terms, for much of his reign from 377 to 353 BC; when he died in 353 BC, Artemisia II of Caria, both his sister and his widow, employed the ancient Greek architects Satyros and Pythis, the four sculptors Bryaxis, Scopas and Timotheus to build a monument, as well as a tomb, for him.
The word "mausoleum" derives from the structure of this tomb. It was a temple-like structure decorated with reliefs and statuary on a massive base. Today a few pieces of sculpture remain. Crusader Knights arrived in 1402 and used the remains of the Mausoleum as a quarry to build the still impressively standing Bodrum Castle, a well-preserved example of the late Crusader architecture in the east Mediterranean; the Knights Hospitaller were given permission to build it by the Ottoman sultan Mehmed I, after Tamerlane had destroyed their previous fortress located in İzmir's inner bay. The castle and its town became known as Petronium, whence the modern name Bodrum derives. In 1522, Suleiman the Magnificent conquered the base of the Crusader knights on the island of Rhodes, who relocated first to Sicily and permanently to Malta, leaving the Castle of Saint Peter and Bodrum to the Ottoman Empire. Bodrum was a quiet town of fishermen and sponge divers until the mid-20th century; the fact that traditional agriculture was not a rewarding activity in the rather dry peninsula prevented the formation of a class of large landowners.
Bodrum has no notable history of religious extremism either. A first nucleus of intellectuals started to form after the 1950s around the writer Cevat Şakir Kabaağaçlı, who had first come here in exile two decades before and was charmed by the town to the point of adopting the pen name Halikarnas Balıkçısı; the population for the town of Bodrum was 35,795 in the 2012 census. The surrounding towns & villages had an additional 100,522, for a total