According to the famous traveler-historian-philosopher Herodotus*, ancient Halicarnassus was founded in an area called Caria by Dorians who mixed with the native populations called Lelegians and Carians. With Cnidus, Cos on the island of the same name, Camirus, Lalysus and Lindus on Rhodes Island, Halicarnassus belonged to the Dorian confederacy.

In the middle of the 6C BC, Halicarnassus came under Persian domination but was ruled through native tyrants (the first one was Lygdamos) centered in Mylasa. His daughter, Queen Artemisia I, backed Xerxes during his expedition against Greece but they were defeated in the Salamis Naval Battle (480 BC) and as a result, Halicarnassus came under the domination of the Athenians. In 386 BC, following a peace agreement, Caria came again under Persian control and was put under the administration of an old Carian dynasty, who lived in Mylasa. Hecatomanus, who ruled with the Persian title of satrap, had three sons, Mausolus, Idrieus and Pixodarus, and two daughters, Artemisia II and Ada. After his father's death in 377 BC, satrap Mausolus transfered the capital of Caria to Halicarnassus. When Mausolus became so powerful that he regained his title of king and achieved a virtual independence, the city enjoyed its greatest prosperity. In 353 BC, upon his death, his sister and wife queen Artemisia II who was famous for her naval victory over the Rhodians, erected a monument to her husband's memory, the Mausoleum, which was one of the Seven Wonders of the World.

Upon the death of Idrieus, his sister and wife Ada ruled until Pixodarus, a faithful ally of the Persians, sent her to exile in Alinda. In 334 BC when Alexander the Great seized the city helped by Ada, the latter was restored on the throne. Halicarnassus was successively incorporated to the Roman, Byzantine and Seljuk Empires, to the Turkish Mentese Emirate and to the Ottoman Empire under Bayezit I. In 1404 Halicarnassus, now called Bodrum by the Turks, was seized by the Knights of Rhodes who built the St Peter Castle. In 1523 Süleyman the Magnificent expelled the Knights from Bodrum and later from Rhodes.

Bodrum itself suffered a shelling by the Russian Navy in 1770 and it was used as a Turkish Naval Base during the Greek revolt of 1824. During the First World War the French battleship "Duplex" fired on Bodrum and tried to make a landing, but the feisty inhabitants prevented this. The Ottoman Empire lost the Bodrum area to Italy, however, and Italian forces occupied the town in 1919. The imminent success of the Turkish war of independence drove the Italians out by 1922 and Bodrum finally became what its beautiful surroundings seem meant for, a place to relax and enjoy life.

When Cevat Sakir Kabaagaçli, the son of an Ottoman diplomat graduate from Oxford, was exiled to Bodrum in 1924 for a period of three years (in fact reduced to one and a half years) because he had written a story setting people against war, he fell in love with the place and elected to remain there for most of the rest of his life. Bodrum was then a simple and remote place where people lived on fishing and sponge-diving. Under the name "Fisherman of Halicarnassus” using a poetic language, in his numerous novels, stories or articles that reflect his deap culture, he wrote about the Anatolian Civilizations, the beauty and richness of western Anatolia, the humanism of the Aegean people. He introduced new fishing techniques, planted trees and worked hard to embellish and make Bodrum known.

In the early 1960s a group of intellectuals from Istanbul, in search of aesthetic ecstasy and spiritual purification, began to visit him in Bodrum. He initiated them to the "Blue Voyage" sailing on a simple boat, where they discovered the natural beauty and the historic richness of south-western Aegean. Later they experienced staying in fishermen’s houses, paying for their room and board (Turkish pansiyon). A new fashion was launched. The middle Turkish class elected Bodrum to spend their holiday and Bodrum rapidly became the principal vacation haven of western Turkey.