Hillside Heritage Villages from Izmir: Şirince and UNESCO-Listed Birgi

In the green mountains surrounding Izmir lie two preserved historical villages that showcase completely different chapters of Aegean domestic architecture: the whitewashed Greek-Ottoman hillside village of Şirince just above Ephesus, and the painted timber-and-stone Beylik and Ottoman capital of Birgi in the Bozdağ mountains.

1. Şirince Village (8 km uphill from Selçuk / Ephesus)

Tucked into a steep amphitheatre of peach orchards, olive groves and pine woods at 350 metres elevation just 15 minutes east of Selçuk station (connected every 20 minutes by regular dolmuş minibuses from Selçuk bus station), Şirince (known historically as Kirkindje) was an Ottoman Greek village until the 1923 population exchange, when Turkish families from Kavala and Thessaloniki settled in its two-storey whitewashed stone-and-brick houses. Because every house was built following the natural contour of the slope, no single window blocks its neighbour's view over the valley:

• What to see and taste in Şirince: climb the car-free cobblestone alleys past the restored 19th-century churches of St John the Baptist (Aziz Yahya) and St Demetrius (decorated with surviving wall frescoes), watch women rolling paper-thin gözleme flatbreads over wood fires, and sample Şirince's famous homemade fruit wines (meyve şarapları) fermented from local peaches, mulberries, pomegranates, melons and strawberries, alongside coffee brewed in hot sand (kumda kahve). One kilometre outside the village in the woods sits the remarkable open-air campus of the Nesin Mathematics Village.

2. Birgi Village (In Ödemiş, 110 km east of Izmir, UN Best Tourism Village)

Sitting at the foot of Mount Bozdağ in the fertile Küçük Menderes valley (reached in 1 hour 30 minutes by car or by taking the TCDD train from Basmane to Ödemiş plus a 10-minute minibus), Birgi served in the 14th century as the capital of the Aydınoğlu Principality (Beylik) and was named one of the World's Best Tourism Villages by UN Tourism. Shaded by monumental 600-year-old plane trees and walnut groves, Birgi looks untouched by the modern world:

• Çakırağa Konağı (1761): one of the masterpieces of 18th-century Ottoman civil architecture in Anatolia. Built by wealthy leather merchant Şerif Ali Ağa for his two wives (one from Izmir and one from Istanbul), the three-storey timber-framed mansion features exquisite wall frescoes painted on the upper winter and summer salons: a panoramic mural of 18th-century İzmir and its bay in one room, and a mural of Istanbul and the Golden Horn in the other, so neither wife would feel homesick.
• Aydınoğlu Mehmet Bey Mosque (Ulu Cami, 1312): a Seljuk-era stone mosque famous for its intact 1322 walnut-wood minbar (pulpit) assembled from 3,000 geometric pieces using the kündekari interlocking technique without a single nail or drop of glue, and a Roman marble lion statue built right into the outer corner wall.