Mugla is a province of Turkey, as the country's south-western corner, on the Aegean Sea. Its seat is Mugla, about 20 km (12 miles) inland, while some of Turkey's largest holiday resorts, such as Bodrum, Oludeniz, Marmaris and Fethiye, are on the coast in Mugla.

Modern Mugla

A sleepy town of 20,000 until recently, disregarded by visitors rushing to its coastal resorts, Mugla has seen been given a new breath of life with the founding of Mugla University in the 1990s. Today the university boasts a 16,000-strong student community, which opened has the city to the outside (including international) world. Also in recent years a large programme of restoration of the city's architectural heritage has enhanced local tourism.

History

In ancient times in Anatolia, the region between the Menderes (Meander) and Dalaman (Indus) rivers in the south was called Caria. The inhabitants were Carians and Leleges. In his Iliad, Homer describes the Carians as natives of Anatolia, defending their country against Greeks in joint campaigns in collaboration with the Trojans.

A major city of ancient Caria, Mugla is known to have been occupied by raiding parties of Egyptians, Assyrians and Scythians, until eventually the area was settled by Ancient Greek colonists. The Greeks inhabited this coast for a long time building prominent cities, such as Knidos (at the end of the Datça Peninsula and Bodrum (Halicarnassos), as well as many smaller towns along the coast, on the Bodrum Peninsula and inland, including in the district of Fethiye the cities of Telmessos, Xanthos, Patara and Tlos. Eventually the coast was conquered by Persians who were in turn removed by Alexander the Great, bringing an end to the satrapy of Caria.

In 1261 CE, Menteşe Bey, founder of the Beylik (principality) that carried his name, with its capital in Milas, established his rule over the region of Mugla as well. The beys of Menteşe held the city until 1390 and this, the first Turkish state in the region, achieved a high level of cultural development, its buildings remaining to this day. The province also became a significant naval power, trading with the Aegean Islands, Crete and as far as Venice and Egypt. Turkish settlement during the Menteşe period usually took place through migrations along the Kütahya-Tavas axis.

In 1390, Mugla was taken over by the Ottoman Empire. However, just twelve years later, Tamerlane and his forces defeated the Ottomans in the Battle of Ankara, and returned control of the region to its former rulers, the Menteşe Beys, as he did for other Anatolian Turkish Beyliks. Mugla was brought back under Ottoman control by Sultan Mehmed II the Conqueror, in 1451. One of the most important events in the area during the Ottoman period was the well-recorded campaign of Süleyman the Magnificent against Rhodes, which was launched from Marmaris.

With this long history Mugla is rich in ancient ruins, with over 100 excavated sites including the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Letoon, near Fethiye.

Places of interest

Although it is so close to the major resorts Mugla has only recently begun to attract visitors itself. Sights of interest in the town include

* the Ottoman Empire-era bazaar (Arasta) - marked by a clock tower built by a Greek craftsman named Filivari Usta in 1895,
* Kurşunlu Cami - a large mosque built in 1495
* Vakıflar Hamam - a Turkish bath which dates back to 1258.
* The old quarter of Muğla - on the slopes and around Saburhane Square (Meydanı), consisting of about four hundred registered old houses dating from the 18th century and the 19th century, many of which are restored. These houses are mainly in the Turkish style characterized with hayat sections ("courts") entered through double-shuttered doors called kuzulu kapı ("lamb doors") and dotted with chimneys typical of Muğla, but there are also 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, and whether they were arranged in intraverted or extraverted styles, as with who inhabited them previously.
* Muğla City Museum - has a good collection of archaeological and ethnographical artefacts, as well as 9 million years old animal and plant fossiles recently discovered in Kaklıcatepe nearby.

The city is also home to Muğla University. The local football club, Muğlaspor currently apply their trade in the third tier of the Turkish football pyramid.

Geography

At 1,100 km (683 miles), Mugla's coastline is the longest among the Provinces of Turkey and longer than many coutries' costlines, (even without taking any small islands into account). As well as the sea, Mugla has two large lakes, Lake Bafa in the district of Milas and Lake Köyceğiz. The landscape consists of pot-shaped small plains surrounded by mountains, formed by depressions in the Neogene. These include the plain of the city of Mugla itself, Yeşilyurt, Ula,Gulagzi , Yerkesik, Akkaya, Çamköy and Yenice). Until the recent building of highways, transport from these plains to either the coast or inland was quite arduous, and thus each locality remained an isolated culture of its own. Contact with the outside world was through one of the three difficult passes: northwest to Milas, north to the Menderes plain through Gökbel, or northeast to Tavas.

The economy of Mugla relies mainly on tourism (on the coast), and agriculture, forestry and marble quarries inland.

Agriculture in Mugla is rich and varied; the province is one of Turkey's largest producers of honey, pine-forest honey in particular and citrus fruits are grown in Ortaca, Fethiye, Dalaman and Dalyan.

The province is the second center of marble industry in Turkey after Afyonkarahisar in terms of quantity, variety and quality. Other mineral exploitation includes coal-mining in Yatağan and chrome in Fethiye. Other industry in the province includes the SEKA paper mill in Dalaman and the power stations at Yatağan, Yeniköy and Kemerköy. However Mugla is by no means an industrialised province.

Transportation

The following are aspects about transportation in Mugla province:

* There are two airports in Dalaman and Milas-Bodrum, serving domestic and international flights and catering to the tourism industry.
* There are yacht marinas in Bodrum, Marmaris, Fethiye and Güllük.
* There are many privately-run bus connections to Izmir, Antalya, Ankara, Istanbul and other major cities in Turkey from Mugla and directly from the coastal resorts.