Myndos Gate

About this place

Alexander the Great was held up here, at least for a while. In 334 BC he laid siege to Halicarnassus, the city that is now Bodrum, and the western walls around this gate saw some of the early fighting. The defenders had dug a moat in front of the walls that the historian Arrian puts at about thirty cubits wide and fifteen deep, roughly 13 metres by 7, and the Macedonians had to fill it before their siege towers could reach the stonework; local tradition holds that the first push on the Myndos side cost Alexander dearly. The city fell soon afterwards, but the gate can fairly claim to be one of the few obstacles that one of history's most relentless conquerors failed to take at the first attempt. The wall it belonged to was the work of Mausolus, the satrap of Caria whose tomb gave us the word mausoleum, who ringed the city with roughly seven kilometres of fortification in the 360s BC. Of all that, this is the only stretch left standing in any meaningful way: two towers with the gateway passage between them, a run of wall, and the trace of the moat. The name comes from the road that led out of it towards Myndos at the tip of the peninsula. The gate was restored at the end of the 1990s, the first phase of work on the towers and walls north of it finished in 1999, and set inside a small landscaped park edged by vaulted Hellenistic and Roman tombs, most of them opened by the British archaeologist Newton in the nineteenth century. Be honest about what this is: a fifteen-to-twenty-minute stop with little signage, and if you do not arrive knowing the Alexander story you may see only tidy stonework beside a busy road. But it is free, always open, and about 1.5 km west of the harbour, so you can walk it or hop on any Gümbet dolmuş. The park paths are generally easy with a pushchair, with no stairs worth mentioning. Fold it into a wider loop: the windmills on the ridge above look over both bays, and the ancient theatre on the main road is close by. In August heat go early or towards sunset, since there is almost no shade among the stones; in winter the park is quiet, rain-washed and entirely yours.