Smyrna’s Aegean port kept trading under a new Turkish name
İzmir is Turkey’s third city after Istanbul and Ankara and the Aegean’s largest metropolis—about 3.5 million in the city, with the province near 4.5 million by late-2025 estimates. Classical Smyrna sat at a deep gulf indentation that made it a Mediterranean mercantile engine for millennia.
Settlement deepens far past the Classical skyline. Yeşilova Höyük and Yassıtepe on the Bornova plain push human presence into Neolithic and Chalcolithic levels between roughly the seventh and fourth millennia BCE; graves near 3000 BCE sit contemporary with early Troy. Old Smyrna at Bayraklı shows Greek pottery from about 1000 BCE; a well-preserved Iron Age house dates 925–900 BCE. By the seventh century the town used a Hippodamian grid—among the earliest such street plans in a western city—and peaked as an Ionian centre between about 650 and 545 BCE.
Lydians took the city around 610–600 BCE; Persian conquest under Cyrus destroyed Old Smyrna in 545 BCE. Alexander the Great is credited with refounding it on Mount Pagos (Kadifekale) around 340 BCE, beyond the Meles. In 133 BCE Attalid Pergamon left Smyrna to Rome; it became one of Revelation’s seven churches of Asia. Hadrian visited in 124 CE; after a 178 earthquake Marcus Aurelius funded rebuilding, including the agora still studied today.
English and other languages kept “Smyrna” into the twentieth century; after Turkey’s 1928 Latin alphabet and diplomatic pressure, İzmir became the international norm, though Italian Smirne and Spanish Esmirna survive. Homer’s epithet Melesigenes—“child of the Meles”—ties the epic poet’s birth legends to this coast. The Temple of Athena at Old Smyrna, dated about 640–580 BCE, still marks the Archaic sanctuary. Today the gulf city hosts the annual İzmir International Fair and multiple universities, trading on a harbour advantage first claimed in deep antiquity under a Mediterranean climate.
Source: İzmir
