The islands answer to a small library of names, and each one is a layer of history. The Greeks called the group Hekatonisa, often mistranslated as the hundred islands but actually meaning Hekate's island, after the ancient goddess. They also called it Moschonisi, the fragrant island. Older still is Apollonesos, the Isle of Apollo. On modern Turkish charts they are the Ayvalık Adaları, or Cunda Adaları. To read a nautical map here is to read the region's whole past at once: a Greek archipelago that became Turkish in the upheavals of the early twentieth century, its old names lingering on the water like a scent that will not fade.

Cunda, now joined to the mainland and the largest of the group, and tiny Lale are the only inhabited islands. That leaves the rest to nature, which is precisely the point of the park. Wild rabbits famously overrun Ilyosta Island. Small beaches and quiet bays ring the others, reachable mainly by boat, drawing the kind of traveler who prefers a cove with no name to a crowded shore. The archipelago is designated as the Ayvalık Islands National Park, a status that has helped keep the depopulated islands as they are: scrubby, sun-bleached, and largely undisturbed.

Not every island here is only a postcard. For a few months in 1922, a Greek Orthodox metropolis, a bishop's seat, was based on Cunda. It did not last. The Aegean of that year was a place of mass displacement, and within a single turbulent stretch the islands lost the Greek Orthodox community that had given them their fragrant Greek names. The empty churches and chapels scattered across the smaller islands, some now no more than rubble, are the quiet remainder of that vanished world. They sit among the rabbits and the gulls, a beauty shadowed by the people who are no longer there to see it.

From the air or from a boat, the park reveals its logic: a cluster of inner-sea islands, a western and northern arc, an outlier off the Altınova shore to the south. Each rock carries its tangle of Turkish and Greek aliases, evidence that people have been naming, claiming, and renaming these waters for thousands of years. The best way to understand the Ayvalık Islands is not to single one out but to take in the whole loose constellation, then climb Şeytan Sofrası, wait for the light to go amber, and watch the islands turn to silhouettes against the sea.