The history of Izmir is the silent continuity of a city that has been reborn after every destruction for three thousand years on the same fault line.

This city, known in antiquity as Smyrna, was born on a low, rocky hill overlooking the sea, where the old Bayraklı district of Izmir is located today; this promontory, which held the strait of the bay and its only narrow isthmus, while people lived on its hills as early as the Bronze Age, was the first answer to the question of how the city of Izmir was founded. The thick walls were constantly rebuilt because an earthquake around 700 BC damaged the walls, and the city was rebuilt each time on its own ruins — archaeology can now read these layers line by line in the cross-section of the hill. After the attack of the Lydian king Alyattes and then the Persians wiped it out for a century, the new location, associated with the dream of Alexander the Great, became the slopes of Mount Pagos; the grid plan was drawn in marble this time, the agora of Smyrna rose with its two-hundred-meter basilica, and Strabo called this ancient city the most beautiful of the cities he had ever seen. The same geography, this coast where East and West meet, was tested once again by the pain of the 1922 fire and the population exchange; but the city rose again at the head of the same bay, along the Kordon and in the shadow of Kadifekale. This story, stretching from the ancient city of Smyrna to present-day Izmir, tells why a city repeatedly returns to the point that brought it down.