She married her brother, then he died. The monument to her grief was a Wonder of the Ancient World
She married her brother, then he died. The monument to her grief was a Wonder of the Ancient World
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The mountainous Bodrum Peninsula rises over the vibrant blue Aegean Sea, its peak richly forested, its foothills stacked with white flat-roofed homes and hotels.
On the peninsula’s exclusive northern coastline, superyachts bob between the ultra-luxury villas and hotels of Paradise Bay. In Bodrum town on the southern shore, traditional gulet sailing boats fill the marina, ready to take tourists on cruises.
Today, it’s where Istanbul’s elite come to relax, party, or be pampered, and where international visitors travel for sunshine and sea.
They are by no means the first people of means to have left their mark here. From the Leleges to the Mycenaeans, from the Romans to the Byzantines, many civilizations have risen and fallen on the peninsula, leaving archaeological treasures in their wake.
The greatest of all, built around 350 BCE on a hilltop overlooking what is now Bodrum town, was the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. It was all the more remarkable because it was created as the result of an incestuous marriage.
Very little remains of the mausoleum today. Today, the biggest historical structure is Bodrum Castle, a huge Gothic fortress overlooking the marina. The region’s importance as a tourism hub is just the latest chapter in its long history of strategic significance.
Ancient Wonder
“It’s like a gateway between East and West,” says Orhan Can, a guide with Bodrum Tour, pointing out that even today Istanbul is the best connected airport in the world. Turkey “has always been a place for business.”
The Mausoleum’s occupants, more than two millennia ago, were Mausolus and his sister-wife Artemesia II, members of the Hectamnod dynasty which ruled over the region then known as Caria between 395 and 366 BCE.
Mausolus and Artemisia made Halicarnassus — now Bodrum — the capital of Caria, boosting its population and initiating many building projects, the most extravagant being their tomb. After Mausolus’s death in 353 BCE, Artemisia oversaw its construction, a temple-like structure designed by the finest Greek architects and sculptors, combining Greek, Egyptian, and Lycian styles.
Decorated with friezes of battle scenes and some 400 freestanding sculptures, its base was more than 400 feet in circumference. It was topped by a pyramid upon which rode a four-horse chariot containing statues of the departed couple.
Artemisia held a grand funeral for her husband, with games and ceremonies. “After Mausolus died, they cremated him,” says Can. Legend has it that Artemesia, the grieving sister-widow, drank her husband’s ashes mixed with wine, which would later become a popular subject for Renaissance painters in the Western world.
She succeeded him as leader, becoming a noted naval commander, but outlived him by just two years. Legend has it that her early death was “because she was so sad,” says Can.
Treasure trail
A series of earthquakes from the 12th to 15th century led to the monument’s collapse. At Bodrum Mausoleum Museum, visitors to the archaeological park look down, not up, into the sunken foundations excavated by British archaeologist Charles Newton in the 19th century. Broken pieces of the 36 columns that once sat under the tomb’s pyramid are scattered all around, while steps lead down to Mausolus and Artemesia’s burial chamber. The mausoleum’s drainage system has also survived.
Newton transported the prize pieces to the British Museum in London, but some original friezes and recently discovered architectural fragments are on display in the park’s small museum.
However, surviving relics from the Halicarnassus era, and from the mausoleum itself, are still found throughout Bodrum and as far as 2,000 miles beyond.
Together, these archaeological puzzle pieces build a picture of life, and death, in one of antiquity’s most thriving harbor cities. Here’s how to follow the treasure trail.
Bodrum’s horseshoe-shaped Antique Theater, built during Mausolus’s reign and then expanded 200 years later during the Roman era, is a 20-minute walk uphill from the mausoleum site.
The theater looks out over the bay towards Bodrum Castle, the construction of which was fortified in the 15th century with marble columns and green volcanic stone from the ruins of the mausoleum.
At its peak, up to 10,000 people could be seated here to view everything from theatrical plays, to gladiator battles, to wild animal fights.
Entertainment today is more sedate. Concerts and cultural events are still held here, to audiences of nearly 4,000, but on the day CNN visits we share this space with just a well-behaved school group and one selfie-taking couple.
Mausolus “built a lot of things back in those days,” says Can. “He made Caria more Greek. He started making people worship Greek gods and goddesses. He started to build temples for them.”
His expensive projects earned him a reputation as a tyrant, with finds raised through taxes, including one reputedly on Lycian men’s hair.
“He said to them, ‘give me your long hair, or you pay me tax,’” explains Can. “But he wasn’t wasting the hair. He was using them for the wigs of aristocrat Persians.”
Alexander the Great at Halicarnassus
One of these projects was building defensive walls around the city. Two gates guarded the east and the west of Halicarnassus, with the remains of the western Myndos Gate still standing on a hillside in the Eskiçeşme neighborhood, within walking distance of the theater.
The original height of the monumental towers of andesite stone is not known, but their sturdy bases have stood for close to 2,400 years. There is also a fourth-century necropolis nearby with Roman and Hellenistic vaulted tombs.
One of the most poignant parts of the site is the 23-feet-wide, eight-feet-deep moat which, during the Siege of Halicarnassus in 334 BCE, for some time held off the forces of Alexander the Great. Many soldiers lost their lives by falling into the moat or being trampled upon, while the collapse of an overloaded bridge also resulted in many casualties.
Back down on the waterfront, Bodrum Castle, an imposing example of Gothic architecture with Ottoman additions, dominates the modern town and also offers the city’s best views over the bay. It’s been on the UNESCO Tentative List of World Heritage sites since 2016.
It was built by the Knights of Saint John, who ruled over Bodrum throughout the 15th century. Not only were parts of Mausolus’s tomb used in the castle’s construction, but the castle is on the same promontory regarded to be the likely site of Mausolus’s palace.
For your 20-euro entrance fee, it’s a multiple-whammy historical experience. As well as being home to the Museum of Underwater Archaeology, it has a wealth of artifacts from the many civilizations that have called this corner of the world home. Its display related to the late Bronze Age Mycenaean people is particularly impressive.
Carian Princess
To see the remains of a woman who was likely the little sister of Mausoleus and Artemesia, head to the Carian Princess exhibit in the museum’s upper levels.
A stone sarcophagus was found in 1989 at a necropolis site in the Yokuşbaşı neighborhood of Bodrum containing a well-preserved skeleton of a high-born woman, along with a gold crown and jewels. She is believed to be Ada, fifth ruler of the Hecatomnid dynasty. Her remains are on display in the museum, along with her belongings and a full-size model based on a facial reconstruction of her skull.
Hecatomnus was Caria’s first indigenous satrap — the term for regional governors in the Persian empire — and ruled from 395 to 377 BCE. Of his five children, two sets of siblings married each other, with the brother-sister couple Idrieus and Ada succeeding Mausoleus and Artemesia.
Neither couple had children, so the marriages may have been symbolic. Sibling marriage was not at all common at this time, with incest generally considered taboo.
“I think back in those days, for royal people, it was okay to do anything they want to do,” says Can. The general population “were accepting whatever they did.”
Intermarriage between the siblings strengthened the dynasty by keeping the bloodline in the family. It also mirrored the mythology of the Greek gods, such as the union of king Zeus and his queen and sister-wife Hera.
Ada’s unusual high-status connections don’t end with the marriage to her brother Idrieus. She ruled over Caria twice, with reigns before and after the Siege of Halicarnassus, having being reinstated to power by her adopted son, Alexander the Great.
High in the hills
The shoreline around Bodrum is lined with beachside restaurants, beaches and bars, but it’s still possible to leave the crowds behind and ascend into the quiet forests of its mountainous interior. Here, the landscape is much as it was in ancient times.
Hidden high on a hilltop and visited by few, just a few miles’ hike from Bodrum town center, is the ancient city of Pedasa, which dates as far back as the 12th century BCE. In the fourth century, Mausolus ruled that the inhabitants of Pedasa and other smaller settlements be relocated to Halicarnassus, to boost the population of the newly established capital.
Pedasa is a stop on the 510-mile Carian Trail, a long-distance hiking route around the region that visits beaches, hills, villages and archaeological wonders. “In Turkey, there are so many ruins, and there’s so many civilizations, and we wanted to focus on the Carian features,” Altay Özcan, co-founder of the trail, tells CNN. Despite the area’s popularity with tourists, it’s still possible for visitors to get “a stretch of nature to yourself,” he says.
Pedasa is a “hidden gem,” says Can, as is Labraunda, “a sanctuary of Zeus. It’s on top of a mountain in the middle of nowhere and it’s like a little Machu Picchu. Idrieus, the brother of Mausolus, built most of it.”
Shortly before his death of unknown causes, Mausolus survived an assassination attempt during a royal procession at Labraunda during an annual festival. The ruins are about an hour’s drive from Bodrum, on the other side of Bodrum-Milas Airport.
Walkway to Myndos
It’s hard to go far in Turkey without tripping over an archaeological treasure, but there are still plenty more wonders hidden underground.
Gümüşlük is a pretty fishing village on the Bodrum Peninsula’s western coast, known for its seaside restaurants. At low tide, you can wade out from the harborside mermaid restaurant along the “King’s Road,” an ancient path that may date back 3,500 years to the Mycenaean era. It leads to a grassy mound known as Rabbit Island, the visible tip of what was once the city of Myndos, established by the Lelegian civilization some 4,000 years ago.
The island is fenced off due to uncompleted excavation work, but the city itself is thought to extend underground through Gümüşlük itself.
Where the key statues are now
Two lion sculptures from the mausoleum now stand at the entrance of the British Museum’s Front Hall in London. The main mausoleum exhibit is in the museum’s Room 21, with other pieces in Rooms 77 and 81.
The walls are a gentle gray-blue, like the sea on a winter’s day, and the sand-colored tiles underfoot complement the marble statues and the slab friezes that line the room.
A colossal statue of a horse, from the chariot group which crowned the tomb, stands at the top of the staircase with head bowed and muscles flaring.
The friezes depict battles between Greeks and Amazons and Greek and Centaurs. In the Amazon frieze, a female warrior prepares to strike a kneeling Greek, while another Amazon appears to cry out for mercy as a caped Greek pulls her back by the hair.
In the center of the room are the two statues traditionally identified as Artemesia and Mausolus, both well over eight feet tall. Their poses are relaxed, their tunics and gathered mantles draped over their chest and thighs to their sandaled feet.
Artemesia’s face is shattered stone, but above it remains her hairstyle of three rolls of curls under a fitted cap. Mausolus’s head, with its wavy hair reaching shoulders some three feet wide, is largely intact. Under arched brows in a full, handsome face, his deep-set eyes gaze imperiously, thoughtfully, the hint of an Elvis pout curling at his lips.
Two-thousand miles from home, more than 2,000 years from their place in history, these effigies of brother and sister, of husband and wife, look blindly down on the stream of visitors in a future they could never have imagined.
The tomb which held them, the robust structure from which they hoped to stand forever over Bodrum and the blue Aegean, was lost centuries ago to the crashing waves of nature, which wash over all.
This article was originally published in November 2025. It was updated and republished in April 2026.
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