Şirince was settled in earnest as Ephesus finally emptied in the 15th century — the highlanders inheriting what the harbor city had abandoned — but most of what you see today is 19th century: two-story Greek stone-and-timber houses stacked up a green hillside, whitewash above, shuttered windows below, vines over everything.
The name is the village’s oldest joke. The earlier Greek-era name came down as Çirkince — “ugly-ish” — which locals will tell you was chosen deliberately, to keep outsiders from coveting a village this lovely. In 1926 the republic tidied the name to Şirince, “pleasant”, and the secret has been comprehensively out ever since.
What the village does best
Şirince is one of the best places on this coast to taste local wines — its specialty the fruit wines (peach, blackberry, quince, pomegranate) fermented in the village — and one of the best to simply eat: courtyard restaurants serve village food, gözleme made in front of you, and Turkish and international dishes on terraces with rooftop views.
Between meals, the lanes sell lace, olive oil, soap and honest souvenirs; the two 19th-century churches — St John the Baptist and St Demetrios — recall the Greek Orthodox centuries before the 1923 population exchange emptied and refilled every house in the village.
The stone-paved lanes are steep and can be hard walking for some — cobbles polished by generations — but the reward structure of the village is sound: every climb ends in a view, a café or a tasting table.
One mosque, two churches
The village hosts a mosque and its churches within a few lanes of each other — a small, unforced picture of Anatolia’s layered story, and a fitting one for a village that has been Greek, Turkish, and above all itself, for five centuries.
