Anaia’s Harbor and Shipyard: A Model of Continuity from Byzantine into Aydinid Period

Situated on the Aegean coast of Asia Minor—about 12 km south of Kuşadası and opposite Samos—Anaia (modern Kadıkalesi) preserves an extended occupation sequence from prehistory to the 19th century. Renowned for its Byzantine remains—including a fortress, a church, and an intramural settlement—Anaia has attracted considerable scholarly attention, yet its waterfront, central to this maritime city’s character, has remained comparatively understudied. This paper reevaluates Anaia’s Late Byzantine harbor and maritime infrastructure through a multidisciplinary synthesis of archival records (Genoese and Venetian), portolan charts, textual sources, and archaeological and epigraphic evidence. The study advances a revised hypothesis for the harbor’s precise location and argues that the waterfront included a substantial shipyard whose operations persisted into the Early Beyliks period, demonstrating continuity of maritime activity across political transitions. A nearby anchorage—later recorded in Ottoman sources as the pier of Aya Yorgi near Cape Aslan—functioned as an auxiliary mooring integrated into Genoese trade networks. Placed alongside the declining seaward role of Ephesos/Agios Theologos and the rise of fortified Ayasuluk and, ultimately, the Ottoman port-city of Kuşadası (so-called Scalanova, late 16th–early 17th c.), these findings refine regional topographic models and illuminate socio-economic transformations shaping the Aegean maritime landscape.