The present village was founded around 1505, but people have lived on this land for far longer. A Paleolithic site has been reported just east of the village at Kemerdağı, and the fields nearby have given up Byzantine building stones, broken columns, and a carved relief, the scattered bones of older settlements. Eğlenhoca is known across the region for what its soil produces: Sultaniye and Razaki grapes, and the prized Hurma variety of olive. These are not abstractions but the actual livelihood of the place, the reason the village exists where it does, on dry slopes facing the sea, tending vines and herds as families here have done for twenty generations.

A traditional Eğlenhoca house tells you something about living on shifting ground. The lower walls are raised from yellowish-white rubble stone, the gaps packed with smaller stones and chips of brick and tile, all bound with mud mortar into walls up to eighty centimeters thick. Larger, more carefully shaped stones brace the corners, and timber ties run through the masonry for strength. The upper floor is lighter, its interior walls a timber lattice plastered with mud and straw, the roofs hipped or gabled and laid with curved tiles. As recently as 2019, fully 42 percent of the village's buildings were still of this traditional kind, though some had slipped into ruin. The thickness and the timber were not decoration. This is earthquake country.

The land here has a long memory of violence. In 1949 an earthquake of the most severe intensity on the Mercalli-Sieberg scale struck the village and its surroundings, leaving houses uninhabitable. The disaster drew national attention: a delegation that included Celâl Bayar and Adnan Menderes — future president and future prime minister of Turkey, respectively — came to see the damage for themselves. Twenty years later, in 1969, another quake brought heavy destruction. Through all of it the village endured, its stone walls absorbing what they could, its people rebuilding what they had to. The population, which counted 687 souls in 1923, has been quietly declining since the 1960s, a slow emptying common to mountain villages across the Aegean.

Two structures anchor the modern village. The Eğlenhoca Mosque was begun in 1813 and not finished until 1846, a project measured in generations rather than years; its careful decoration came later, between 1899 and 1902. Rectangular in plan, with a flat wooden ceiling and a wooden dome, it was built to hold a congregation of just over two hundred, roughly the whole village at prayer. Southwest of town lies the Karaburun-Mordoğan reservoir, sometimes called Eğlenhoca Lake, whose dam was completed in 2007 and which is now the largest body of water in the district. Once, before the roads, the village reached the world by boat from a pier at Kösedere on the Gulf of İzmir. The Urla-Karaburun road, opened in 1933, finally tied this quiet vineyard village to the land.