When our visitors who spend their holiday with gulets from our Marmaris gulet charter fleet, enjoy the beauties of nature but they also ignore the history in this destinations. We though there is a benefit to tell the history behind these beauties.
The Carian coast from Gumusluk to Marmaris is a wild mountainous area which until comparatively recently was largely dependent on the sea for transportation and communication. Today you can reach Milas from Bodrum by a fast highway in half an hour, but twenty years ago the journey took four hours on the old road.
The Carians were an indigenous people in this southwest corner of Anatolia, living here before the first Aeolian an Ionian colonists arrived at the begining of the first Millennium BC. After the Ionians, the Dorians arrived and colonised much of the area as well as The Greek islands opposite. The Dorian league thus formed was composed of Knidos, Kos, Kamirus, Lindos, Rhodes and Halicarnassus. When the Persians arrived the area was allowed a considerable degree of autonomy, with local satraps keeping order but owing allegiance to the Persians.
In the 4th century BC Mausolos was made satrap of the region and he set about making Caria great. He modelled the cities along Greek lines and expanded the Carian fleet, and soon Halicarnassus was the thriving centre of Caria. We know much about Caria from Herodotus, the father of written history, who was born in Halircarnassus in 430 BC. He recorded in detail the life and times not only of Caria, but of most of the known world, in his history of the conflict between the Greeks and the Persians. For best gulet options for you please contact us or send your request from our Marmaris gulet charter page.
When Alexander the Great swept through Asia Minor he left the Carians their independence, although they owed allegiance to him. There are many types of gulets in our Marmaris gulet charter fleet. In the struggles that followed Alexander’s death, and under Roman and Byzantine rule, the recion declined, and until recently it was considered pretty much a remote part of Turkey. In the early part of the last century dissident writers and artists were exiled to Bodrum from the delights of Istanbul.
Over the last 25 years tourism has brought prosperity to the area and large numbers of holiday villages have been built around some of the more accessible coast. This concrete saturation has without doubt obliterated the charm of some parts of the area, including Bodrum peninsula, but fortunately there are still remote and wild areas enough in the deep gulfs along the coasts.
The coast from Oren in the Gulf of Gokova to Serçe Limanı is all now a special environmental protection area, with an on-going research project which hopefully should protect it from developers who must be itching to begin work here. Bodrum and Marmaris are two of the major centers for charter Yachts in Turkey, and in early May there is agents week in Marmaris. Around the Carian coast and extending along the Lycian coast you will find the greatest concentration of yachts in Turkey. Many are based in Turkey like the gulets in our Marmaris gulet charter fleet, but many also come across from Greece to explore this rugged coast.
