Marmaris Museum

The Marmaris Museum occupies the castle on the peninsula overlooking the sea. The earliest information on a fortress here is given by Herodotus of Halicarnassus, and the 17th-century traveller Evliya Çelebi writes that the present castle was built in 1522 by order of Süleyman the Magnificent during the Rhodes campaign and used as a military base. He also mentions large cut stone blocks at the foundations, which are the remains of a Hellenistic castle about 2,000 years old and can still be seen. The Ottoman building inscription is still in place.

For decades before the restoration of the 1980s, houses stood inside the castle. Since restoration finished in 1991, it has served as a museum. The castle has seven closed spaces; four of them and the courtyard display objects from the Bronze Age, Archaic, Classical, Hellenistic, Roman, Eastern Roman and Ottoman periods.

The collection includes finds from the ancient city of Knidos on the Datça peninsula, from excavations at Burgaz and the Apollo sanctuary at Emecik, and a few rare pieces that came to the museum by other routes. The garden shows altars, columns and capitals, Ottoman tombstones, cannons and cannonballs, and an important group of amphorae and vessels recovered from under the sea.