Ayvalık's older name was Kydonies, from the Greek word for quince, though it is olives, not quince, that have defined it for centuries. The surrounding groves still supply a huge share of Turkey's olive oil. Under Ottoman rule from the fourteenth century, Kydonies enjoyed unusual autonomy and grew rich as a port, shipping for Hellenistic-rooted inland cities like Pergamon, modern Bergama. Its population stayed overwhelmingly Greek into the twentieth century. That long continuity ended violently in the wars of 1919 to 1922, a brutal period of inter-ethnic massacres on the road to the modern Turkish republic. The Greeks of Kydonies were among the many who suffered and were forced out.

The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne brought a hard, lasting peace and a sweeping population exchange. Greeks were deported from mainland Turkey; Muslims were deported from Greek territory. Into the emptied town of Kydonies, renamed Ayvalık, came Turks from Crete. It was, by the cruel arithmetic of such things, one of the better-matched exchanges. Cretan architecture, street life, and cuisine shared much with what had been left behind, so the newcomers fit the old houses more easily than most. Yet a good match cannot soften the fact that two communities lost their homelands in the same stroke. The Cretan Turks who settled here had also been uprooted, strangers making a life among another people's abandoned walls.

Walk Ayvalık's center and the layered past is literally overhead. The Saatli Camii, the Clock Mosque, was a Greek Orthodox church built in 1850; in 1928 a minaret went up and the interior was barely touched. Nearby Çınarlı Mosque is another neoclassical Greek church turned mosque. The shell of Panaya Church stands roofless north of the great Taksiyarhis Church, abandoned in 1923 and broken by a 1944 earthquake. At the Sevim and Necdet Kent Library, icons and frescoes rescued from Orthodox churches are kept safe. These buildings are not erasures so much as palimpsests, each one carrying both the faith that raised it and the faith that inherited it.

Among the elegant mansions stands a neglected house at 13 Nisan Caddesi, number 112, where the novelist Elias Venezis was born in 1904. His story is the town's tragedy made personal. When the area changed hands in 1922, Venezis was conscripted into a 3,000-man labor battalion and sent on a death march from which only a couple of dozen men survived. He survived, and turned the ordeal into his book Number 31328, named for the number he was given. Many of the crumbling old houses in his district could tell similar stories. Most are losing their race against time and the developers, but Venezis wrote his down, and so it endures.

Modern Ayvalık wears its heritage lightly and eats extremely well. The waterfront meyhanes line tables down narrow alleys, serving seafood with rakı, and a local toasted sandwich, the Ayvalık tostu, has its own modest fame. Squash blossoms get stuffed where grape leaves usually would. South of town the breezy hilltop of Şeytan Sofrası, Satan's Table, draws crowds at dusk; a mark in the rock is said to be the devil's footprint, and a car-park attendant collects his own small toll. Across the bridges lies Cunda island, the resort heart of the archipelago, and beyond it the long sandy sweep of Sarımsaklı Beach.