Around the Sea of Marmara: Exploring İstanbul's backyard

ISTANBUL. KAZINFORM Racing into İstanbul in a taxi from the airport, visitors rarely have time to appreciate the lovely stretch of water to their right. Then they wake up in their Sultanahmet hotels and find that breakfast is served on a roof terrace that offers a panoramic view of what some mistakenly assume to be the Bosporus but is in fact the Sea of Marmara.

Covering an area of 11,350 square kilometers, the Sea of Marmara has always held great strategic importance as the link between the Black Sea and the Aegean via the straits of the Bosporus to the northeast and the Dardanelles to the southwest. It's named after Marmara, the largest island in the Marmara group that lies to the south of the sea. That in turn is named after the marble ("mermer" in Turkish) that is still quarried in great quantities there, Today's Zaman reports.

The Sea of Marmara is effectively İstanbul's backyard, yet most of the settlements along its shore receive relatively few foreign visitors despite being easy to get to. The following is a summary of what to see if you drive around the sea in a counterclockwise direction. Tekirdağ

Heading west out of İstanbul along the northern shore of the Sea of Marmara, it takes a long time to get clear of the urban sprawl and the build-up of holiday homes, but eventually you arrive in Tekirdağ, best known in Turkey for its rakı factory but also an active fishing port where you can stroll along the promenade and watch the men fixing their nets in the sun.

The main mosque is a minor work of the great architect Sinan, but more interesting are two small museums, the first the local archeology museum which is housed in a magnificent early 20th-century building, the second a monument to Prince Francis II Rakoczy (1676-1735), a Hungarian exiled to this then-remote Ottoman town after he took part in the Hungarian War of Independence against the Habsburgs. It contains some lovely watercolors of old Tekirdağ. Gelibolu

If you continue driving around the shores of the sea, you will eventually reach the mouth of the Dardanelles at Gelibolu, a very pretty little harbor town presided over by a tower that has been converted into a museum to Piri Reis (c. 1465-1555), a Gelibolu-born admiral who produced the first map to show the American continent in its entirety. Gelibolu is also home to a small Çanakkale museum as well as to the largest Mevlevihane (lodge for whirling dervishes) in the world. There's a beach at nearby Hamzaköy and fish restaurants dishing up fresh sardines all around the harbor.

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