Metravel city quest
City Antalya: free walking route “Quest: the Old Town of Kaleiçi” along the sights. 9 points. Approximately 2 h 30 min. Quests and legends - straight from your
Every city has a birthday, and this one also has a technical brief. Around 150 BC, Attalus II, king of Pergamon, sent his men along the southern coast of Asia Minor with an order that people have been retelling for two thousand years: “Go and find me paradise on earth.” The scouts came back and told of a bay beneath high cliffs, where the Taurus Mountains come right down to the sea. The king founded a port city there and named it after himself — Attalia. Over twenty centuries the name has been worn smooth into “Antalya”, while the city still stands exactly where it was.
The place turned out to be so well chosen that nobody wanted to let it go: the Romans (Emperor Hadrian himself visited in AD 130 — and the city welcomed him with a marble gate), the Byzantines, the Seljuks, who took Attalia in 1216, and then the Ottomans. Every era left a layer, and all those layers fit into a single quarter — Kaleiçi, “inside the fortress”: a maze of tiled roofs and narrow lanes wound around a small round harbour.
Today you will walk this maze from end to end: from the clock tower, past the Seljuk minaret that is the symbol of the city, down to the ancient port, then to the emperor’s gate, to the building that changed its faith five times, to the mysterious Roman tower — and to the cliff from which you can see all of the “paradise” that the scouts of Attalus found.
What to do: 1) Read the story and the task at each stop. 2) Find the place on the map and walk to it. 3) Look around and answer the question.
The route is on foot, about three kilometres, almost all of it along the pedestrian lanes of Kaleiçi. We start on Kale Kapısı Square, by the stone clock tower — where the Old Town meets the new one. Let’s go!
The route points in order — what these places are and why they are interesting. Tasks and answers stay inside the quest.
This stocky stone tower is the oldest resident of the square. Its foundation was laid back in Hellenistic times; under the Byzantines it became part of the city’s defences and for centuries guarded the main entrance to the fortress — Kale Kapısı, “the fortress gate”, after which the whole square is still named.
From the tower, take just a few steps deeper into the Old Town — and on your right you will see the main Ottoman mosque of Kaleiçi. It was built more than four centuries ago, at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries (historians still argue about the exact date), and named after Tekeli Mehmet Pasha.
Go back to the square and look west: above the tiles of Kaleiçi rises a tower of dark red brick, unlike any minaret you have ever seen. This is Yivli Minare — the “fluted minaret”, the main symbol of Antalya: you will find its silhouette here on everything, from the coat of arms to souvenir magnets.
Don’t hurry: you are following a route that porters, sailors and merchants have walked for two thousand years. Here it is — the very bay that the scouts of Attalus II called paradise on earth.
Now climb back up from the harbour and cross the whole of Kaleiçi to the east, to the boundary of the Old Town — to where a white marble gate stands in the line of the fortress wall. This is the “emperor’s gate” we spoke of at the very start of the route.
From Hadrian’s Gate, head deeper into the neighbourhood along Hesapçı Street (Hesapçı Sokak) — the main pedestrian thread of southern Kaleiçi. After a few hundred metres, on your left, you will see a building with perhaps the stormiest biography in all of Antalya.
Keep walking down Hesapçı Street towards the sea — the street itself will lead you to the edge of the Old Town, to a squat reddish tower above the cliff. It is almost nineteen hundred years old and is perhaps the most mysterious structure in Antalya.
Karaalioğlu Park begins at Hıdırlık Tower — walk into it and take your time: this is the home stretch of the route, and it is more beautiful than all the previous ones.
An optional stop — on the eastern edge of Karaalioğlu Park, a couple of steps from its walkways, stands a white two-storey mansion with a red tiled roof. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Republic of Turkey, stayed in this house during his visits to Antalya — 6–10 March 1930 and 18–19 February 1935.
This route is part of Metravel city quests. Below are the other quests in this city and cities with quests nearby.