by Dream Shell Real Estate 
Alanya is a historical city of rare beauty that hosted pirates in ancient times, feudal lords in the Byzantine period and finally rose to the capital during the Anatolian Seljuk period. Alanya was located between Pamphylia and Cilicia in ancient times. According to Herodotus, the people of this region are descendants of the people who dispersed to Anatolia after the Trojan War. In the researches (Kadıini Cave-1957), it was understood that the first settlement dates back to the Upper Palaeotic Period, 20 thousand years ago.
Its first known name in history is Coracesium. It was under the invasion of the Persians in the 4th century BC. It later became a haven for pirates. In 139 BC, the Seleucid Empire invaded the city. But even after that, the city could not get rid of being a shelter for pirates. The city, which was annexed to the territory of the Roman Empire by the Roman commander Magnus Pompeius in 65 BC, became Kalonoros, meaning “beautiful mountain” in the Byzantine period with the collapse of Rome.
After the Crusader armies established the Latin Empire in Istanbul in 1204, a vacuum of authority arose in Anatolia. Kyr Vart, a feudal lord, established dominance in Kalonoros on behalf of the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia. The city was captured by the Anatolian Seljuk Sultan Alaaddin Keykubat in 1221. Sultan Alaaddin Keykubat had the city renovated by marrying the daughter of the lord Kyr Vart and made it the winter capital. He named the city as Alaiye, which means the city of Sultan Alaaddin. During the reign of Alaaddin Keykubat, the city lived its heyday. Today’s castle, shipyard and many of the structures still standing are from that period.
As a result of the disintegration of the Anatolian Seljuks in 1300, the city came under the rule of the Karamanoğlu Principality. Karamanoğulları, based in Konya, sold the city to the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt for 5 thousand gold in 1427. Finally, with the unity of Anatolia and the emergence of the Ottoman Principality, Alaiye was included in the territory of the Ottoman Empire in 1471 by Gedik Ahmet Pasha, one of the commanders of Fatih Sultan Mehmet.
During the Ottoman Empire, Alaiye was first connected to the Province of Cyprus (1571), then the sanjak of the Konya Province (1864), then the sanjak of Antalya (1868), and finally the district of Antalya in 1871. In 1931, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk visited Alaiye, although it was not in his program, and in response to this gesture, the mayor of the time, Hüseyin Hacıkadiroğlu, sent a telegram on behalf of the people of Alaiye, conveying the love, respect and devotion of the people of Alaiye to the ship Atatürk was traveling on after the visit. However, since all of the telegrams sent from land to the ship were transmitted over Çanakkale at that time, the name of Alaiye was mistakenly written as Alanya in the telegram that reached Atatürk. Realizing this, Atatürk gave the order to change the name of Sultan Alaaddin’s city to Alanya.[5] In the Republican era, the city was named Alanya after that by the order of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.
