Ionia travel guide

Ionia (Ancient Greek Ιωνία) was an ancient region of southwestern coastal Anatolia (in present-day Turkey, the region nearest İzmir which was historically Smyrna), on the Aegean Sea, generally consisting of the northernmost territories of the Ionian League of Greek settlements on Anatolia which were primarily settled (or at least governed) by the various Ionian Greek city-states. It is eponymously named after the Greek Ionian tribe who in earliest times occupied mainly the Aegean islands in between mainland Greece and the peninsula of Anatolia, but whose peoples migrated and founded settlements in both Attica (most significantly, Athens) and the region named after them in today's Turkey.
Ionia proper, comprised a narrow coastal strip from Phocaea in the north near the mouth of the river Hermus (now the Gediz), to Miletus in the south near the mouth of the river Maeander, and included the islands of Chios and Samos. It was bounded by Aeolia to the north, Lydia to the east and Caria to the south. The cities within the region figured large in the strife between the Persian Empire and the Greeks.
According to the universal Greek tradition, the cities of Ionia were founded by colonists from the other side of the Aegean and their settlement was connected with the legendary history of the Ionic race in Attica, by the statement that the colonists were led by Neleus and Androclus, sons of Codrus, the last king of Athens. In accordance with this view the "Ionic migration", as it was called by later chronologers, was dated by them one hundred and forty years after the Trojan war, or sixty years after the return of the Heracleidae into the Peloponnese. Without assigning any definite date, recent research as of 1910 has tended to support the popular Greek idea that Ionia acquired its Greek element relatively late — after the Dorian invasions, and by extension, after the earlier Aegean period as well. (...) more....

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