Castle of St Peter

The Castle of St Peter dominates Bodrum's harbour from a rocky promontory, its towers visible from every point in the town. The Knights of St John built it after 1402, following Tamerlane's destruction of Smyrna, and it remained a crusader stronghold until the Ottomans took it in 1522. The architecture is a layered mixture of medieval European and Ottoman additions, with inscribed coats of arms from various European noble houses set into the walls.

Inside the castle, the Museum of Underwater Archaeology is one of the best of its kind in the world. The collection includes Bronze Age shipwrecks, Byzantine glass cargo, and a reconstructed section of a 7th-century Byzantine merchant vessel. The glass wreck gallery alone, with its cargo of raw glass ingots and finished vessels recovered from 1,000 metres of water, is worth the entrance fee. Allow two hours at minimum.

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A story
When the Knights of St John built the castle in the 15th century, they recycled stones from the ruins of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus — one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World — which lay just a few hundred metres away. Some of the relief sculptures they removed are still visible in the castle walls today. The knights' economy with ancient marble inadvertently preserved fragments that would otherwise have been lost to later building campaigns.