Antalya was Attaleia, founded by Attalos II of Pergamon around 150 BCE, then Roman, Byzantine, Seljuk and Ottoman in turn. Three days trace that layering: Pamphylian city-states inland, imperial marble in the museum, and living stone in the walled town.
Pamphylian city 18km east, mentioned in Acts as Paul's landing point. The colonnaded street with its water channel, the Hellenistic gate towers of 3rd century BCE and a 12,000-seat stadium survive. Open 08:00-19:00 summer.
The best-preserved Roman theatre in the Mediterranean, built about 160 CE by the architect Zenon under Marcus Aurelius. The stage building stands to full height; Seljuks reused it as a caravanserai, which is why the roof line survived.
The Pisidian mountain city that Alexander the Great besieged in 333 BCE and failed to take, at 1,050m inside Güllük Dağı national park. Necropolis of smashed sarcophagi, a theatre on a cliff edge, and the gymnasium in pine forest.
The symbol of Antalya: a 38m brick minaret of eight fluted half-cylinders raised by the Seljuk sultan Alaeddin Keykubad I around 1230, on the site of a converted Byzantine church. The six-domed prayer hall dates to 1373.
A Hellenistic port that grew rich on the Cilician pirate slave trade until Pompey ended it in 67 BCE. The re-erected columns of the 2nd-century Temple of Apollo stand on the point; the theatre seats around 15,000 on vaulted substructures.
The 14m cylindrical tower on a square podium, built around 2nd century CE probably as a monumental tomb for a Roman senator, later serving as a lighthouse and bastion at the corner of the city wall. The Atatürk statue faces the sea nearby.
The 19th-century stone mansion at Işıklar Caddesi where Mustafa Kemal stayed on his visits of 1930 and 1935, restored with period furniture, telegrams and photographs of the republican reforms. Closed Mondays; open 08:30-17:30.
The seaward stretch of fortification shows the whole sequence in one wall face: Hellenistic ashlar blocks at the base, Roman rubble core, Byzantine repairs and Seljuk crenellations, with reused column drums bonded into the masonry.
One building, five religions of state: a 2nd-century Roman temple, then a 5th-century Byzantine basilica dedicated to the Virgin, then a Seljuk mosque, a church again under Cypriot rule, then a mosque whose minaret burned off in the 1896 fire.
Two restored Ottoman buildings — a 19th-century Antalya house showing wedding and circumcision customs in life-size tableaux, and the Greek Orthodox church of Aya Yorgi of 1863, now holding Çanakkale and Kütahya ceramics.
The Ottoman residential quarter east of the walls, with timber-framed bay-window houses and the mosque endowed by Tekeli Mehmet Paşa in the 18th century, notable for the İznik tile panels flanking its mihrab and its rebuilt 1926 dome.
Dinner inside a 19th-century Ottoman mansion courtyard on Mermerli Sokak: hibeş with tahini and cumin, kölle şiş grilled over charcoal, and şakşuka, served under the same orange trees that shaded the household's kitchen garden.