Antalya

01 · The province

A province, not a resort

When people say Antalya, they usually mean the city. Often they mean only the hotel they stayed in.

Antalya is a province, and it runs along much of Türkiye’s Mediterranean coast, from Kaş in the west to Gazipaşa in the east.

Behind it, the whole way, stand the Taurus Mountains. West of the city they come straight down to the water, which is why that coast is all coves, cliffs and islands. East of the city they step back, and the shore opens into long sand.

The city itself sits on a shelf of travertine cliffs above the sea. The rivers that come down from the mountains do not always bother with a beach. At Lower Düden, a river simply runs off the edge of the cliff and falls into the Mediterranean.

At Alanya, in the east, the Seljuk sultan Alaeddin Keykubad built the Red Tower in 1226 to guard his shipyard. Both still stand at the water’s edge.

02 · The city

Founded by a king, visited by an emperor, shaped by the Seljuks

Around 150 BC, Attalos II, king of Pergamon, built a city around a harbor on this coast and named it after himself: Attaleia. The story still told in the city is that he sent his men out to find heaven on earth, and this is where they stopped.

Old European maps turned the name into Adalia. Turkish turned it into Antalya. The harbor Attalos wanted is still there at the foot of the old town, and it is still at work. Travelers have sailed from it for two thousand years, the apostle Paul among them.

In AD 130 the emperor Hadrian came. The city built a triple-arched marble gate for the visit, and you can still walk through it.

In 2026 the world came again, for COP31.

The Seljuks took the city in 1207 and gave it much of the character it still has. The fluted Yivli Minaret, finished in 1230, is the symbol on half the city’s signs, and the Karatay Madrasa of 1250 still stands in Kaleiçi behind its carved stone portal. Nearby, the Broken Minaret stands over a building that has been a Roman temple, a Byzantine church and a mosque in turn.

The Ottomans first took the city in 1391 and held it for good from 1423. They gave it the Murat Pasha Mosque in 1570, whose windows carry the earliest tile panels of any Ottoman mosque in Antalya, and early in the seventeenth century the Tekeli Mehmet Pasha Mosque in the heart of the old town.

The walled quarter they all stand in is Kaleiçi. The name means, simply, inside the castle.

03 · The ancient cities

A coast of cities older than the empires that ruled them

The Greeks called the plain around the city Pamphylia, the land of all tribes. Drive east or north and the ancient cities come one after another, most of them within an hour.

At Perge, in the second century, a woman named Plancia Magna paid for the city’s great gate and had her name carved on it.

Also at Perge, in 1980, archaeologists found the lower half of a marble statue, the Weary Herakles. The upper half, it emerged, had left the country and ended up in a museum in Boston. In 2011 the two halves were reunited, and Herakles now stands whole in the Antalya Museum.

At Aspendos, the theater built between AD 161 and 180 is one of the best preserved in the Roman world. It has never really stopped being a theater: opera and ballet are still performed there on summer nights.

Side’s name meant pomegranate in an old language of Anatolia, and the fruit is stamped on its ancient coins.

High in the mountains, Termessos was besieged by Alexander the Great in 333 BC. He looked at it, gave up, and marched on.

And older than all of them: in Karain Cave, a short drive from the city center, people were living in the Old Stone Age.

04 · Lycia

The western coast, where tombs are cut into the cliffs

West of the mountains the province becomes Lycia, an older and stranger country.

The Lycians cut their tombs into cliff faces in the shape of temple fronts. They left stone sarcophagi standing in fields, on beaches, and at the top of a shopping street in Kaş, where people still walk around one on the way to dinner.

Their cities formed the Lycian League, which gave its larger cities more votes than its smaller ones. Nearly two thousand years later, Montesquieu held it up as the model of a good federal republic, and the Federalist Papers quoted him while the American Constitution was being argued over.

The League’s assembly hall still stands at Patara, beside one of the longest sand beaches in Türkiye, where loggerhead turtles come ashore every summer to nest.

Demre, ancient Myra, keeps its own rock tombs in the cliff above the town. Saint Nicholas served there as bishop in the fourth century.

At Kekova, the streets of a Lycian town slid under the sea after earthquakes, and you can look down at them from a boat. The Lycian Way, Türkiye’s first long-distance walking trail, runs for more than 500 kilometers along this coast.

05 · Mountain and sea

Snow on one side, the sea on the other

The Taurus is never out of sight here. From Konyaaltı beach you look straight across the bay at the Beydağları range, often with snow on it well into spring.

In early spring you can ski at Saklıkent in the morning and swim in the sea in the afternoon. It is about an hour between the two.

Above Kemer, a cable car lifts you from the pine forest above Tekirova, 726 meters up, to the summit of Tahtalı, 2,365 meters up, in a single ride.

Near Olympos, at Yanartaş, flames burn straight out of the rock, fed by gas seeping from the ground. They have been burning for thousands of years. The ancients took them for the breath of the Chimaera, the monster the hero Bellerophon killed.

Inland, the Köprülü River cuts a canyon through the mountains, under a Roman bridge that is still in use.

06 · The table

What grows here, and what it becomes

The orange is the city’s fruit. The film festival held here since 1964, the oldest in Türkiye, gives its winners a Golden Orange.

Finike oranges are known across the country. The orchards are picked in winter, when the rest of Europe is eating them.

Behind the coast, the plain is glass. Antalya is Türkiye’s greenhouse garden, and a great deal of the country’s winter tomatoes and peppers ripen here. Further east, around Alanya and Gazipaşa, bananas grow.

The local table has its own habits. Antalya’s piyaz is a white bean salad dressed with tahini, which surprises anyone who has eaten piyaz elsewhere in Türkiye. It comes beside şiş köfte, and it is not optional.

07 · Why it is all on a shirt

Everything on this page is somewhere in the store

We started this store because we fell in love with this province. And because we kept meeting people who had come here for years and knew only a small corner of it.

So the range is built the way this page is. The harbor, the gate, the minaret, the theater, the tombs, the turtles, the orange, the mountain. Each one drawn by designers who live here.

Every date printed on our designs is the true date of the thing it sits under: 150 BC under Antalya’s own name, AD 130 under Hadrian’s Gate, 1230 under the Yivli Minaret. And every design carries the name of the place it is about, so that whoever asks about your shirt learns something true.

If you have been here, it is a way of staying a little longer. If you have not been yet, it is a good place to start.