The historian and the fisherman of Halikarnassus

Photo: Herodotus bust,
Exploring Bodrum

The first historian of the Western World was born in 484 BCE in an area then known as Caria. His home town of Halicarnassus is now the Turkish city of Bodrum.

Herodotus wrote a book called simply Histories, in which he reports what he has discovered by observation and inquiry. He begins the book by expressing his desire to preserve in memory the achievements of Greeks and non-Greeks, as well as the nature of the conflict between these groups as he defined them.

In 1925, as the Ottoman Empire wound down, a Turkish writer who had once been an Oxford don was convicted of a crime and exiled to the city of Bodrum, then considered a backwater. There he wrote under the Turkish nom-de-plume of Halikarnas Balikjici, the fisherman of Halicarnassus. His statue may be seen in Bodrum.

Along with the Colossus of Rhodes and the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Mausoleum at Halikarnassus was another of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.