Myndos Gate: Walking Through Bodrum's Ancient Wall

Most visitors drive past Myndos Gate without realizing it. It sits on a busy junction on the road out toward Gümüşlük, hemmed in by traffic and apartment blocks, easy to mistake for a roadside ruin with no story attached. But this modest patch of stone is one of the few fixed points where we can say, with real confidence, that a specific historical event happened right here: Alexander the Great's siege of Halicarnassus in 334 BC.

A Gate Built for a King's Ambitions

Halicarnassus, the city that would become Bodrum, was fortified under the Carian ruler Mausolus in the fourth century BC. Mausolus is better known today for the tomb that gave us the word