The old town gathers around a squat stone castle, a reminder that Çeşme was once a port that mattered more than Izmir, trading through the Middle Ages with the Genoese who held nearby Chios. It passed to the Ottomans in 1566 without a fight, after which commerce drifted eastward to Izmir and the town settled into a quieter life. In front of the castle stands a monument to Cezayirli Gazi Hasan Pasha, shown as ever beside his pet lion. Born a Georgian and sold into slavery, he learned his seamanship among the corsairs of Algiers, fought in the great naval battle in this very bay, and rose to become admiral and grand vizier, one of the more improbable careers the empire produced.

That battle is the town's brush with world history. In July 1770, during the Russo-Turkish War, a Russian fleet under Aleksey Orlov cornered the Ottoman navy in the bay at Çeşme and destroyed it almost entirely, burning the trapped ships through a long night of fire. It was one of the most lopsided naval victories of the age and a humiliation for the Ottomans, even as the young officer Hasan Pasha distinguished himself in the disaster and launched the career that the harborside monument commemorates. The Russians held a presence in the Aegean for years afterward, though the war's lasting territorial gains lay far away around the Black Sea. Today the bay is calm, but it carries that memory.

Modern Çeşme is built on simpler pleasures. A few kilometers from town, Ilıca is the spa quarter, where the thermal waters that gave the town its name feed hotel pools or rise warm in the sea itself. The beaches string out along the peninsula, Boyalık on the Ilıca strip, Altınkum and Dilaila across the headlands to the south, their sand backed by the steady wind that makes this coast a magnet for windsurfers and kiteboarders. Between dips, the town offers its own small specialties: kumru, a warm sandwich stuffed with sucuk sausage and grilled cheese, and dondurma, the local ice cream, best tried in honey-almond or black currant.

Among the nineteenth-century Ottoman houses and back alleys near the castle stands Ayios Haralambos, a Greek Orthodox church built in 1832 and now serving as an art gallery and cultural venue. Its survival is a thread back to the mixed world this coast once was, before the population exchanges of the 1920s carried away the region's Greek communities. The saint it honors, Charalambos, was an early bishop remembered for a martyrdom so theatrically devout that, in the old telling, onlookers kept converting and being martyred in turn. The building, repurposed and preserved, is one of the quieter places where that older Çeşme still shows through.

Çeşme makes a natural base for the whole peninsula. Inland lies Alaçatı, the stone-house village with its cobbled streets, bougainvillea, and photogenic windmill, a short hop away by dolmuş. Across the water, Chios is the easy day-trip to Greece, reachable by fast catamaran in about twenty minutes. East toward Izmir, the great Roman city of Ephesus waits to the south, one of the best-preserved ancient sites anywhere. International tourists often bypass Çeşme for the busier resorts down the coast, which is part of its appeal: the crowds here are mostly Turkish, and the town keeps a more local, unhurried feel than its glossier rivals.