İzmir

İzmir (UK: /ˈɪzmɪər/ IZ-meer, US: /ɪzˈmɪər/ iz-MEER; Turkish pronunciation: [ˈizmiɾ] ^ⓘ) is a metropolitan city on the west coast of Anatolia, and capital of İzmir Province. It is the third most populous city in Turkey, after Istanbul and Ankara, and the largest urban agglomeration on the Aegean Sea.

In 2019, the city of İzmir had a population of 2,965,900, while İzmir Province had a total population of 4,367,251. Its built-up (or metro) area was home to 3,209,179 inhabitants. It extends along the outlying waters of the Gulf of İzmir and inland to the north across the Gediz River Delta; to the east along an alluvial plain created by several small streams; and to slightly more rugged terrain in the south.

İzmir has more than 3,000 years of recorded urban history, and up to 8,500 years of history as a human settlement since the Neolithic period. In classical antiquity the city was known as Smyrna (/ˈsmɜːrnə/ SMUR-nə; Greek: Σμύρνη, romanized: Smýrni/Smýrnē) – a name which remained in use in English and various other languages until around 1930, when government efforts led the original Greek name to be gradually phased out internationally in favor of its Turkish counterpart İzmir. Until the 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey, İzmir had a very large Greek population.

The modern name İzmir is the Turkish rendering of the Greek name Smyrna and "Smyrne" (Σμύρνη). In medieval times, Westerners used forms like Smire, Zmirra, Esmira, Ismira, which was rendered as İzmir into Turkish, originally written as ازمير with the Ottoman Turkish alphabet.

Lying on an advantageous location at the head of a gulf running down in a deep indentation, midway along the western Anatolian coast, İzmir has been one of the principal mercantile cities of the Mediterranean Sea for much of its history. It hosted the Mediterranean Games in 1971 and the World University Games (Universiade) in 2005. The city participated in Climathon in 2019.