Izmir Tourism and Travel Guide

İzmir (Turkish pronunciation: [ˈizmiɾ]) is a metropolitan city in the western extremity of Anatolia and the third most populous city in Turkey, after Istanbul and Ankara. İzmir's metropolitan area extends along the outlying waters of the Gulf of İzmir and inland to the north across the delta of the Gediz River, to the east along an alluvial plain created by several small streams and to a slightly more rugged terrain in the south. The ancient city was known as Smyrna (Greek: Σμύρνη Smyrni [ˈzmirni]), and the city was generally referred to as Smyrna in English, until the Turkish adoption of the Latin alphabet in 1928 made 'İzmir' the internationally recognized name. The city of İzmir is composed of several metropolitan districts. Of these, Konak district corresponds to historical İzmir, this district's area having constituted the 'İzmir Municipality' (Turkish: İzmir Belediyesi) area until 1984, Konak until then having been a name for a central neighborhood around Konak Square, still the core of the city. With the constitution of the 'Greater İzmir Metropolitan Municipality' (Turkish: İzmir Büyükşehir Belediyesi), the city of İzmir grouped together initially nine, and more recently eleven, metropolitan districts, namely Balçova, Bayraklı, Bornova, Buca, Çiğli, Gaziemir, Güzelbahçe, Karabağlar, Karşıyaka, Konak and Narlıdere. Almost all of these settlements are former separate district centers or neighborhoods, with their own distinct features and temperament. In an ongoing process, the Mayor of İzmir was also vested with authority over the additional district area reaching from Bergama in the north to Selçuk in the south, bringing the number of districts considered as being part of İzmir to twenty-one under the new arrangements, two of these having been only partially administratively included in İzmir. In 2014, İzmir had a population of 2,847,691, while İzmir Province had a total of 4,113,072.