Cultural Heritage: Antalya

This week you turn the heritage sites you walk through into lessons your own students can do — starting from the subject you already teach, not from history.

• Monday — you work out where heritage actually fits in your own syllabus, and try the digital tools you will use on the field days.
• Tuesday — you walk a single-era ancient site and work out what makes a place teachable rather than just impressive.
• Wednesday — you test those strategies against an old town where four eras share the same streets, and find out which ones stop working.
• Thursday — you stay in Kaleiçi but move indoors, into two buildings kept and reused rather than left as ruins, and ask what a curated room costs a class compared to the street outside.
• Friday — you build one digital activity from your own photographs and notes, and try it on people who did not design it.

You go home with a filled-in lesson-plan sheet for every site you visited, one digital activity — a trail, a quiz or a small exhibit — already tested by other participants, and a course pack covering the city’s layers. Every task starts from the subject and the class you already have, so nothing here needs a budget, a partner school or a trip of your own to be useful.

Heritage teaching has a habit of stopping at the famous photograph. A class is shown a monument, told which century it belongs to, and moved on — and the students learn that heritage is something other people had, somewhere else, a long time ago.

Antalya is useful precisely because it refuses that. Four eras sit within a short drive of each other, and inside the old town of Kaleiçi they sit within the same few streets. A harbour traditionally associated with King Attalus II of Pergamon, around 150 BCE, grew under Roman rule into a fortified port marked by Hadrian’s Gate and the Hıdırlık Tower — a structure from antiquity whose original purpose, tomb or lighthouse or watchtower or signal point, is still debated. Seljuk rule became permanent in 1216, and in the decades after, during the reign of Sultan Alaeddin Keykubad (1220–1237), the Yivli Minaret was built. Ottoman merchants then filled the same walled quarter with the stone-and-timber houses that still line its streets. You can cross those layers on foot in an afternoon.

Days 2 to 4 are honestly built around three different kinds of encounter rather than one continuous walking loop. Tuesday is a standalone excursion to Perge, a Pamphylian and Roman city around 18 km outside Antalya, where a single era makes the method easy to learn. Wednesday stays inside Kaleiçi’s compact old town, where four eras interrupt each other and the strategies from Tuesday get properly tested. Thursday stays in Kaleiçi too, but moves indoors — into two buildings that were kept and put to a new use rather than left as ruins, where the objects on display have been separated from the buildings they came from.

What separates this from a guided tour is the order of work. You document a teaching strategy on site, then test it against different material the next day, and refine it again on the third — so you leave with strategies already tried against three kinds of real evidence, not with a blank template. The week is built for teachers of any subject: maths estimating the stadium’s capacity, science reading a water channel, citizenship arguing about who decides what gets saved.

Kaleiçi’s own rescue is part of the course rather than its backdrop. The quarter was declared a protected site in 1972 after decades of decay, restored, and in 1984 the restoration won the FIJET “Golden Apple” tourism award. Most heritage teaching shows students the finished product; this lets you show the decision, including the part where the place was nearly lost. One building near the old walls makes the same point in miniature: it has no construction inscription and its origins are genuinely uncertain, it is understood to have served as a Mevlevi lodge from the early sixteenth century, it housed the state art gallery for decades, and since 2018 it has been a museum about the Mevlevi tradition. Which of a building’s several pasts becomes the one it is named after is a choice somebody made.

This week will not train you in conservation science, restoration technique or heritage law. Those are the professions that keep Kaleiçi standing; this course is about what a teacher does with such a place once it has been saved.