The Çeşme Museum lives inside the walls of Çeşme Castle, the Ottoman stronghold on the western tip of the Anatolian coast. The Aegean is only about sixty meters to the west, and just in front of the entrance stands a statue of the admiral Cezayirli Gazi Hasan Pasha with his lion. After the weapons were removed because of the moisture problem, the museum was reconceived. From 1984 it reopened as a general-interest museum, and that is what it remains: a modest, layered collection that suits a building which has itself served many purposes over the centuries.

Long before the Ottomans, this shore belonged to the Greek world. One hall of the museum gathers objects from the Archaic, Roman, and Byzantine eras - terracotta figurines, oil lamps, everyday pottery that outlived the hands that shaped it. A second hall is given over to finds from rescue excavations at nearby Erythrae, one of the twelve Ionian cities, known to the Turks as Ildırı. From its soil came more terracotta figures, silver and copper coins, and amphorae, the big-bellied jars that once carried wine and oil across the Mediterranean. Together they sketch a coast that has been settled, traded, and fought over for the better part of three thousand years.

The most charged room in the museum looks out, in a sense, onto its own subject. One hall commemorates the Battle of Çeşme, the eighteenth-century naval clash fought in the bay just beyond the walls, where in July 1770 a Russian fleet destroyed the Ottoman navy almost entirely in a single night of fire. The hall holds maps, posters, flags, and medals - and, most strikingly, objects raised from the seabed itself, including relics of the sunken Russian flagship that perished in the very battle it helped win. To see them here, a stone's throw from the water that swallowed them, collapses the distance between the exhibit and the event.