Balıkesir

i.Between Two Seas

Balıkesir occupies a distinctive strategic position — neither fully Aegean nor fully Marmaran, but bridging both. The province extends from the southern shore of the Sea of Marmara (with the major port-town of Bandırma on the Erdek Körfezi and the great freshwater Manyas Gölü bird sanctuary nearby) southward across the Hodul, Susurluk, and Edremit plains to the northern Aegean coast at Ayvalık and the Edremit Körfezi, with the great wooded mass of Mount Ida (the ancient Ida, Turkish Kaz Dağı) — 1,774 metres at its summit — rising along the western boundary toward Çanakkale. The province is moderately sized (about 14,272 km², about the same as Antalya), with a population of approximately 1.26 million (2022 census) — sizable but not crowded. The city of Balıkesir itself, at approximately 150 metres elevation on the Hodul plain, has around 280,000 in its central districts.

The province's economy and identity have rested historically on three things: olive cultivation in the Edremit and Ayvalık country (the Edremit Körfezi is one of the great olive-oil-producing regions of the eastern Mediterranean, with the famous Ayvalık tradition that produces some of the most-prized table-grade Turkish olive oils); livestock and dairy in the inland highlands (the famous Susurluk lale yoğurdu and the dairy traditions of the Bandırma–Susurluk plain); and archaeology and tourism centred on the ancient cities of Pergamon, Adramyttium, and the Mysian coast.

A province between two seas — and the country whose 1345 voluntary absorption into the Ottoman state, with its strong navy and gifted commanders, made the Ottoman crossing into Europe possible.

ii.Ancient Mysia and the Etymology of the Name

The Balıkesir country was, in antiquity, the heart of Mysia — the ancient regional name for north-western Anatolia between the Aegean and the Sea of Marmara. The Mysians never formed an independent state in their own right; they lived successively under the dominion of Troy, the Hittites, the Phrygians, the Achaemenid Persians, Alexander the Great, and finally the Pergamene kings of the Attalid dynasty. With the death of the last Pergamene king and the 133 BCE bequest of the kingdom to Rome, Mysia passed into the Roman province of Asia.

The etymology of the modern name Balıkesir is much debated. Among the proposals: (a) the most academically-supported derivation traces the name from the Greek Paleo Kastro ("Old Castle"), referring to a hunting lodge said to have been built in the region by the Roman emperor Hadrian in the 2nd century CE; (b) a folk etymology derives the name from the Old Turkic balık ("city, castle"), parallel to the Uyghur-period Central Asian Beşbalık, with Türkmen settlers naming their new home in memory of Central Asia; (c) another folk etymology has balı kesir ("much honey"), referring to the abundance of beekeeping; (d) various other derivations from Persian, Greek, and Arabic roots have been proposed but are less well-attested. The medieval Arabic geographer Ibn Battuta and later Ottoman sources sometimes write the name as Balık Hisar ("Castle of the Town") or Balak Hisar.

iii.Pergamon — the Hellenistic Capital

The most famous ancient city of Balıkesir province is Pergamon (Turkish Bergama), in the south-western Bergama district. Founded in the early 3rd century BCE under the Attalid dynasty, Pergamon rose under Eumenes II (reigned 197–159 BCE) to become one of the great Hellenistic capitals — the seat of an extensive kingdom covering much of western Anatolia, the home of one of antiquity's most important libraries (the Library of Pergamon, second only to Alexandria, with an estimated 200,000 volumes at its height), the site of the great Asclepion healing sanctuary (one of the most important medical centres of the ancient world, where the famous physician Galen was born and trained), and the location of the spectacular Pergamon Altar (much of which is now in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, with significant fragments remaining in situ).

The last Pergamene king, Attalus III, died in 133 BCE without heirs and bequeathed his kingdom to Rome. The bequest gave Rome its first major Asian territory and transformed Rome from an Italian to a Mediterranean power. The wider Pergamon archaeological site — the acropolis with its great theatre and library foundations, the lower city, the Asclepion, the Red Basilica (the great Roman temple of the Egyptian gods later converted to a Byzantine church) — was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2014 as "Pergamon and its Multi-Layered Cultural Landscape." The site is among the most important archaeological landscapes in Türkiye.

iv.The Karesi Beylik (c. 1300–1345)

After the Roman, Byzantine, and Seljuk centuries, the Balıkesir region emerged as one of the most consequential of the late-medieval Anatolian beyliks. Following the Battle of Manzikert (1071) and the Mongol pressure of the mid-13th century, the western Anatolian country was settled by successive waves of Turkic migrants. Around 1300, the Türkmen commander Karesi Bey (also written Kara İsa) — formerly an important commander of the Anatolian Seljuk state — declared his independence and founded the Karesi Beylik with its capital at Balıkesir, exploiting the weakness of Byzantine authority in the wake of the failed Crusades.

The Karesi Beylik extended its borders to include Bergama, İvrindi, Edremit, Burhaniye (then Kemer Edremit), Bayramiç, Ayvacık, Ezine, Susurluk (then Fırt), Bigadiç, and Sındırgı — a substantial territory across both the Marmara and northern Aegean coasts. The beylik developed a notable naval capacity, larger and more effective than that of the neighbouring early Ottoman state. Karesi Bey was succeeded by his son Aclan Bey, who maintained good relations with the rising Ottoman beylik under Orhan Gazi; Aclan's son Dursun Bey in fact resided at the Ottoman court at Bursa.

The decisive transition came under Aclan's eldest son Demirhan Bey, who succeeded after Aclan's death but ruled tyrannically. The Karesi notables and the population, dissatisfied with Demirhan, invited Dursun Bey back from Bursa to take the throne. Dursun travelled to Karesi with Orhan Gazi's support in 1345; on his arrival, however, he was killed by his brother Demirhan, who had taken refuge in Bergama Castle. Orhan Gazi, in response, took the entire Karesi Beylik into the Ottoman state — at the formal invitation of the population and the surviving Karesi notables.

v.How Karesi Made the Ottoman State

The Ottoman absorption of Karesi in 1345 is one of the most consequential moments in early Ottoman history. The Ottoman beylik at this time was still small — its territory consisted of the Bithynian country around Bursa — and was outclassed by its larger Anatolian rivals. With Karesi's incorporation came three transformative gifts:

The navy. Karesi had built up the most capable naval force on the Anatolian Aegean coast. The transfer of this navy to the Ottoman state gave Orhan and his successors, for the first time, the capacity to project power across the Dardanelles. Within a decade, Ottoman ships were carrying Ottoman armies into the Balkans.

The commanders. The leading Karesi commanders — Evrenos Bey, Hacı İlbey, Ece Halil, and Gazi Fazıl Bey — became some of the most important Ottoman generals of the next two generations. Evrenos Bey in particular became one of the architects of Ottoman expansion into the Balkans (his tomb is at Yenice-i Vardar, in northern Greece), and his descendants — the Evrenosoğulları — were one of the most important Ottoman military lineages well into the 17th century.

The territorial base. The Karesi country gave the Ottoman state a stretched-out Aegean coastline, a substantial agricultural hinterland, and direct access to the Çanakkale Strait — all of which were essential to the subsequent Ottoman crossing into Rumelia (the European side). The crossing came in 1352, when Ottoman forces under Orhan's son Süleyman Paşa took the castle of Çimpe (Çinbi) on the Gallipoli peninsula and established the first Ottoman foothold in Europe. Within a generation the Ottomans had conquered most of Thrace; within a century, Constantinople itself had fallen.

Orhan Gazi made his son Şehzade Süleyman the first sancak bey of the new Karesi Sancak, with the centre at Balıkesir. The Karesi name was preserved in the Ottoman administrative title for the entire Ottoman period, until the 1923 Republican-era renaming.

vi.Ottoman Karesi and the Long Provincial Centuries

Through the long Ottoman peace, Karesi was a quiet sancak of the Anadolu Eyalet, with substantial agricultural activity, the developing olive economy of the Edremit Körfezi, and the maritime trade of Bandırma and Ayvalık. The 19th-century population grew substantially through the absorption of refugees from the lost Ottoman territories: after the 93 Harbi (the 1877–1878 Russo-Turkish War) and the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913, large numbers of Turkish refugees from the Balkans, the Caucasus, and the Crimea were resettled in the Balıkesir country, transforming the demographic mix of many districts and adding the distinctive Balkan-Turkish, Circassian, and Crimean Tatar cultural strands that persist today.

The province's western boundary lies on the Çanakkale Strait, just south of the great strategic narrow that controlled the entire approach to Istanbul. During the Gallipoli Campaign (Çanakkale Savaşı) of 1915–1916, the Balıkesir country served as one of the rear-area provinces for the Ottoman Fifth Army defending the strait. The campaign — one of the great Ottoman victories of the First World War — had its operational base partly in the southern Balıkesir country, and its anniversary (18 March, the date of the great naval victory of 1915) is still observed as Çanakkale Şehitlerini Anma Günü.

vii.The Balıkesir Congresses (1919) and the War of Independence

The Greek army landed at İzmir on 15 May 1919; within weeks the Greek advance had spread into the Aegean hinterland. The first Greek landing in Balıkesir province came at Ayvalık on 29 May 1919; the first armed resistance in the Aegean theatre of the War of Independence took place at Ayvalık. In Balıkesir city, on 18 May 1919, a Redd-i İlhak ("Rejection of Annexation") heyeti (committee) of forty-one members was formed under Vehbi (Bolak) Bey at the Alaca Mescid mosque. The Redd-i İlhak heyeti became one of the earliest formally-organised resistance councils of the broader Turkish national movement.

The Redd-i İlhak organised two major congresses at Balıkesir: the First Balıkesir Congress of 26–31 July 1919 and the Second Balıkesir Congress of 16–22 September 1919. These congresses, predating and paralleling the more famous Erzurum (July 1919) and Sivas (September 1919) congresses of the eastern theatre, established the framework of the Kuva-yı Milliye (National Forces) in the western Anatolian theatre and coordinated the initial resistance to the Greek occupation. The Balıkesir Congresses are recognised in Turkish historiography as among the founding moments of the War of Independence.

The military situation deteriorated through 1920. Captain Kemal of Istanbul arrived to organise the Balıkesir-area regular forces; engagements at the Soma-Akhisar front held for nearly a year. With the collapse of the Soma-Akhisar front in June 1920, the Greek occupation spread inland; Balıkesir city itself was occupied. The two years of Greek occupation that followed brought substantial hardship and inter-communal violence.

The decisive turn came with the Turkish victory at the Sakarya River (August 1921) and the subsequent Great Offensive of August 1922 from Afyonkarahisar (see the Afyonkarahisar essay). On 9 September 1922 the Turkish army entered İzmir and the Greek army withdrew across the Aegean. In the first week of September 1922, Balıkesir and its districts were liberated in a series of quick recoveries as the Greek forces evacuated. The two-year occupation was over.

viii.The Republican Renaming and Modern Balıkesir

The Karesi Sancak became the Karesi Vilayet in 1923. In the same year, a Republican-era law replaced the old Ottoman name Karesi with the modern Balıkesir, both for the province and the central city. The Karesi name survived in some district and street names but was retired from official provincial nomenclature.

Modern Balıkesir is a substantial regional centre with a varied economy. The Edremit Körfezi olive country, the Ayvalık coast, the Bandırma–Manyas–Kapıdağ peninsula in the north (with the famous Manyas Kuş Cenneti bird sanctuary), the Susurluk dairy plain, and the city of Balıkesir itself together form one of the most diverse provincial economies in north-western Türkiye. The Bandırma–Bursa–İzmir high-speed rail line (under construction) and the long-established Bandırma Port connect the province to the broader Marmara economy.

ix.The Monuments and the Districts

Pergamon (Bergama) — the UNESCO World Heritage Site (2014) with the acropolis, Asclepion, and Red Basilica. The most important archaeological destination in the province; allow a full day.

Mount Ida / Kaz Dağı National Park — the great forested massif on the western edge of the province, the mythological mountain of the gods who watched the Trojan War. Multiple trekking and yayla destinations.

Ayvalık — the historic Aegean port town with its 19th-century Greek-period stone houses, the surrounding olive country, and the offshore island of Cunda (Alibey Adası). One of the most-visited coastal destinations in north-western Türkiye.

Manyas Kuş Cenneti (Bird Paradise) — the great wetland bird sanctuary on Lake Manyas, with over 250 bird species recorded.

Edremit, Burhaniye, Akçay — the great olive country of the Edremit Körfezi, with the long line of olive-growing villages and the spring olive blossom festivals.

Bandırma — the major port town on the Marmara, with the historic Mustafa Kemal Atatürk Müzesi commemorating the 19 May 1919 departure of Atatürk for Samsun (Atatürk sailed from Bandırma on his way to begin the War of Independence).

x.Visiting Balıkesir Today

Balıkesir is reached by air into Balıkesir Koca Seyit Airport (at Edremit) for the southern coast, or via Bursa or İzmir airports with onward bus or rail. The province has substantial rail connections (Balıkesir is on the historic Istanbul–İzmir line) and an extensive bus network.

A long weekend covers the major destinations: Pergamon for a full day; Ayvalık and Cunda for one or two days; the Edremit Körfezi olive country for a day; Mount Ida and the Kazdağı National Park for a hiking day. Travellers with more time should add Bandırma, the Manyas bird sanctuary, and the Marmara islands offshore.

The Balıkesir table is the Aegean-Marmara table at its richest: Susurluk lale yoğurdu (the famous Susurluk yogurt, a Geographic Indication); the olive oil and olive products of the Edremit Körfezi; the Bandırma Ayvalık tostu (the famous Ayvalık-style tost sandwich); the kuyu kebabı of inland districts; and the wide range of dairy products. For the broader Aegean table, see Anatolian Tables; for recipes, our sister site TurkishCooking.com.