Bodrum, the castle and the empty site of the Mausoleum

Bodrum is now a resort, and a cheerful one: white houses climbing two bays, a marina full of masts, and in summer a great deal of noise after dark. Between the two bays, on a rocky spit that was once an island, stands a castle of honey-coloured stone with towers at every corner, and a short walk inland, behind a wall in a quiet residential street, is the place where one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world used to stand. The two are connected more closely than most visitors realise. A good deal of the second is built into the first.

The tomb that gave us a word

In the fourth century BC this was Halicarnassus, the capital of Caria, a region of south-western Anatolia, and its ruler was Mausolus, a satrap of the Persian king who ran his territory much as he liked. He and his wife and sister Artemisia planned for him a tomb on a scale nobody in the Greek world had seen: a high base, a colonnade, a stepped pyramid roof and, on top, a chariot drawn by four horses, all covered in sculpture by some of the best-known Greek sculptors of the day. It was so famous that his name has stood for a monumental tomb ever since. Every mausoleum, down to the family vaults of English country churchyards, is called after a Carian.

The ancient lists of the Seven Wonders included it, alongside the pyramids of Giza and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. It also lasted longer than most of them. The tomb was still standing in the Middle Ages, and it was earthquakes that finally brought it down. By the time the Knights of St John arrived, it was a heap of fallen marble.

The knights and their castle

The Knights Hospitaller, the military order also known as the Knights of St John, held Rhodes, a short sail to the south. Early in the fifteenth century they took the chance of a moment of Ottoman weakness to establish a foothold on the mainland opposite, and began building the Castle of St Peter on the old island at the harbour mouth. They named the town after the saint, Petronium, which in time became Bodrum.

The castle was built and rebuilt over the next century, and the knights quarried the ruins of the Mausoleum for it, first for building stone and later, when they strengthened the walls against cannon in the 1490s, again. Green volcanic blocks from the tomb's foundations went into the walls, much of its marble was burnt for lime mortar, and some of its sculpted frieze was set into the masonry, where it stayed until the nineteenth century. Knights from across Christian Europe served here, and the towers were divided among the nations of the order; one of them is still known as the English Tower.

Since the 1960s the castle has housed the Bodrum Museum of Underwater Archaeology, built on decades of underwater excavation off the Turkish coast. Its best-known exhibit is the Uluburun wreck, a merchant ship of the late fourteenth century BC that sank off the coast south of Kaş, which is one of the oldest shipwrecks ever excavated. It went down with some ten tonnes of copper, most of it probably from Cyprus, and about a tonne of tin. There is also the tomb of the so-called Carian Princess, found during building work in the town. The castle itself, its courtyards, ramparts and chapel, is reason enough to climb up, and from the towers the two bays and the whole of the town lie spread out below.

An empty site that is worth the walk

In the 1850s the British archaeologist Charles Newton, working for the British Museum, located the site of the Mausoleum, dug it and, with permission from the Ottoman government, shipped what he found to London: large statues usually identified as Mausolus and Artemisia, parts of the chariot horses, and long stretches of frieze. Some frieze slabs had already been taken from the walls of the castle. The finest of the sculpture is in the British Museum to this day, and a Danish expedition led by Kristian Jeppesen dug the site again from 1966 into the late 1970s.

What remains in Bodrum, then, is the place itself. The site of the Maussolleion is a rectangular pit cut into the rock, the size of the vanished building, with the foundations, a few column drums and scattered fragments of marble lying around it, the drains and the stair down to the burial chamber, and a small covered display with models of how the tomb might have looked. It takes half an hour. It is also, in its way, the most eloquent thing in Bodrum: you stand at the edge of the empty footprint of a Wonder, then walk down to the harbour and see its stones in the castle walls.

Halicarnassus has one more claim on visitors. It was the birthplace of Herodotus, the Greek writer often called the father of history, and his account of the wars between the Greeks and the Persians is still the best introduction to the world Mausolus inherited.

Cruises that call at Bodrum

Bodrum is a call on three Fred. Olsen cruises in the eastern Mediterranean, all sailing from Piraeus, the port for Athens, and all in November, when the summer crowds have long gone.

The nine-night Greek Islands & Turkish Riviera is the shortest of them, with Bodrum, Rhodes, Alanya and Heraklion in Crete. It is a neat pairing: the knights who built the castle at Bodrum ruled from Rhodes, and their old town there is the other half of the story.

The twenty-one-night Wonders of Greece, Turkey & Egypt takes in Bodrum, Rhodes, Alanya and Heraklion, then Istanbul, Kuşadası for Ephesus, and Alexandria, the city of another of the Seven Wonders, the Pharos lighthouse.

The thirty-three-night Scenic Shores & Ancient Wonders of the Mediterranean is a long voyage through the Adriatic and back, with Taranto, Sarandë, Koper, Šibenik, Dubrovnik and the Bay of Kotor among its calls before Bodrum, Rhodes and Alanya.

With a day ashore, climb the castle in the morning, before the heat and the tour groups, and walk to the Mausoleum after lunch. The order matters less than seeing both.