Qualla: Ayvalık Islands Nature Park

Ayvalık Islands Nature Park: Introduction

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MrDoğukan, CC BY-SA 4.0. Count them from the hilltop called Şeytan Sofrası at sunset and the math gets slippery: twenty-two islands, the references say, plus more bare rocks than anyone bothers to total. The Ayvalık Islands spill across the northeastern Aegean off Balıkesir Province in Turkey, a protected archipelago of bays, low scrub, and water that turns molten gold as the sun drops behind them. People live on only two of these islands. The rest belong to the rabbits, the seabirds, and the silence.

Image: MrDoğukan | CC BY-SA 4.0

Ayvalık Islands Nature Park: A Name in Two Languages

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ostique at Turkish Wikipedia, Public domain. The islands answer to a small library of names, and each one is a layer of history. The Greeks called the group Hekatonisa, often mistranslated as the hundred islands but actually meaning Hekate's island, after the ancient goddess. They also called it Moschonisi, the fragrant isl...

Image: Ostique at Turkish Wikipedia | Public domain

Ayvalık Islands Nature Park: Where the Wild Things Stayed

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Selenkaptan, CC BY-SA 4.0. Cunda, now joined to the mainland and the largest of the group, and tiny Lale are the only inhabited islands. That leaves the rest to nature, which is precisely the point of the park. Wild rabbits famously overrun Ilyosta Island. Small beaches and quiet bays ring the others, reac...

Image: Selenkaptan | CC BY-SA 4.0

Ayvalık Islands Nature Park: A Brief, Sad Spring

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Antoloji, CC BY-SA 4.0. Not every island here is only a postcard. For a few months in 1922, a Greek Orthodox metropolis, a bishop's seat, was based on Cunda. It did not last. The Aegean of that year was a place of mass displacement, and within a single turbulent stretch the islands lost the Greek Orthod...

Image: Antoloji | CC BY-SA 4.0

Ayvalık Islands Nature Park: Reading the Archipelago

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ayser, CC BY-SA 4.0. From the air or from a boat, the park reveals its logic: a cluster of inner-sea islands, a western and northern arc, an outlier off the Altınova shore to the south. Each rock carries its tangle of Turkish and Greek aliases, evidence that people have been naming, claiming, and ren...

Image: Ayser | CC BY-SA 4.0