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Bayraklı (District Municipality, Turkey)

Flag of Bayraklı, horizontal and vertical version - Images by Tomislav Šipek, 10 December 2017

Presentation of Bayraklı
Flag of Bayraklı

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Presentation of Bayraklı

The municipality of Bayraklı (314,008 inhabitants; 20,000 ha) is located 10 km north of İzmir. The district was established on 6 March 2008, separating from Karşıyaka.

Ivan Sache, 10 December 2017

Flag of Bayraklı

The flag of Bayraklı (photo, photo), also used vertically (photo), is white with the municipality's emblem. "Belediyesi" means "Municipality".

The emblem, designed by Behzat Yilmaz, was selected among 578 proposals by a jury composed of the heads of the Department of Graphic Design and staff of the Faculty of Communication from the five universities located in İzmir.
The emblem merges past and future.
[Bayraklı blog, 2 July 2009]

The column recalls that the ancient town of Smyrna was located on the today's territory of Bayraklı.
The early Hellenic settlement lay on a small peninsula, inhabited since the beginning of the 3d millennium B.C., on the NE coast of the gulf of Smyrna. This site is now a hill E of the town of Bayraklı, 4 km N of Izmir. Strabo (14.646 reported that it lay 20 stadia from the city of his time, on a bay beyond it, and gave the exact location. The earliest Protogeometric pottery found in abundance at Bayraklı reveals that the first Hellenic settlement was founded in the 10th or even the 11th c. B.C. The Protogeometric pottery of Bayraklı is closely related to that of Athens, but it is also individual and probably of local manufacture. Geometric pottery (ca. 825-675 B.C.), in each of its three phases, also shows some Attic influence and relationship with neighboring E Greek centers, but is likewise of local origin.
The oldest building of the Hellenic settlement is an oval house consisting of a single room built ca. 900 B.C. In the 9th c. rectangular houses appear: these likewise consist of a single large room but have stone foundations. Three well-preserved examples have been uncovered. In the next level, from before the middle of the 8th c. to the mid 7th, the oval house is dominant and rectangular ones rarely appear.
The earliest Greek defensive system dates back at least to the 9th c. Originally a deep core with thicknesses of mudbrick and stone packing in some places, and a facing of stout, irregular masonry, it was restored or enlarged more than once down to the late 7th c.
The early Hellenic stratum (1050-650 B.C.) reveals a simple existence based mainly on agriculture. Smyrna, on the border of Aiolis and Ionia, was probably the actual birthplace of Homer and the Iliad, in the second half of the 8th c. B.C.

The city enjoyed its greatest prosperity between 650 and 545 B.C. The houses of this period are of the megaron type, consisting of a porch and two rooms. The houses were always oriented N-S or W-E, indicating some axial planning as early as the 7th c.
The well-preserved temenos terrace of the temple, with walls of carefully fitted polygonal and rectagonal masonry, is now entirely uncovered. The first monumental structure of the sanctuary dates from the third quarter of the 7th c. The temple in its last phase, with its carved Proto-Aiolic capitals, was the earliest monumental sanctuary of the E Greek world; it was dedicated to Athena, according to the inscription on a small bronze bar recently excavated.
The city was insignificant during the 5th-4th c. In the time of Alexander the Great, however, the population outgrew the peninsula, and a new, larger city was founded on the slope of Mt. Pagos.
Strabo (14.646) described Smyrna as the finest Ionian city of his time, the turn of the 1st c. B.C. The city was centered around the harbor, on flat land where the Temple of the Mother Goddess and the gymnasium also stood. The streets were straight and paved with large stones. After an earthquake in A.D. 178 the city was reconstructed with help from Marcus Aurelius.
[The Princeton Encyclopedia of Classical Sites]

Tomislav Šipek & Ivan Sache, 10 December 2017