The Gulf of Alexandretta or İskenderun () is a

gulf A gulf is a large inlet from an ocean or their seas into a landmass, larger and typically (though not always) with a narrower opening than a bay (geography), bay. The term was used traditionally for large, highly indented navigable bodies of s ...

of the

eastern Mediterranean The Eastern Mediterranean is a loosely delimited region comprising the easternmost portion of the Mediterranean Sea, and well as the adjoining land—often defined as the countries around the Levantine Sea. It includes the southern half of Turkey ...

or Levantine Sea. It lies beside the southern Turkish

provinces A province is an administrative division within a country or state. The term derives from the ancient Roman , which was the major territorial and administrative unit of the Roman Empire's territorial possessions outside Italy. The term ''provi ...

Adana Adana is a large city in southern Turkey. The city is situated on the Seyhan River, inland from the northeastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea. It is the administrative seat of the Adana Province, Adana province, and has a population of 1 81 ...

and

Hatay Hatay Province (, ) is the southernmost Provinces of Turkey, province and Metropolitan municipalities in Turkey, metropolitan municipality of Turkey. Its area is , and its population is 1,686,043 (2022). It is situated mostly outside Anatolia, ...

Names

The gulf is named for the nearby Turkish city of

İskenderun İskenderun (), historically known as Alexandretta (, ) and Scanderoon, is a municipality and Districts of Turkey, district of Hatay Province, Turkey. Its area is 247 km2, and its population is 251,682 (2022). It is on the Mediterranean coas ...

, the classical Alexandretta. It was also formerly known as the Sea or the ( or ') ().

Herodotus Herodotus (; BC) was a Greek historian and geographer from the Greek city of Halicarnassus (now Bodrum, Turkey), under Persian control in the 5th century BC, and a later citizen of Thurii in modern Calabria, Italy. He wrote the '' Histori ...

and

Stephanus of Byzantium Stephanus or Stephen of Byzantium (; , ''Stéphanos Byzántios''; centuryAD) was a Byzantine grammarian and the author of an important geographical dictionary entitled ''Ethnica'' (). Only meagre fragments of the dictionary survive, but the epit ...

also records it as the (), after the nearby town of Myriandus.. Between the 9th and 12th centuries, the gulf was known as the Armenian Gulf or the Armenian Bay ().

Geography

The Gulf of Alexandretta forms the easternmost bay or

inlet An inlet is a typically long and narrow indentation of a shoreline such as a small arm, cove, bay, sound, fjord, lagoon or marsh, that leads to an enclosed larger body of water such as a lake, estuary, gulf or marginal sea. Overview In ...

of the

Mediterranean Sea The Mediterranean Sea ( ) is a sea connected to the Atlantic Ocean, surrounded by the Mediterranean basin and almost completely enclosed by land: on the east by the Levant in West Asia, on the north by Anatolia in West Asia and Southern Eur ...

. It lies beside the southern coast of Turkey, near its border with

Syria Syria, officially the Syrian Arab Republic, is a country in West Asia located in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Levant. It borders the Mediterranean Sea to the west, Turkey to Syria–Turkey border, the north, Iraq to Iraq–Syria border, t ...

. In antiquity, the adjacent

Nur Mountains The Nur Mountains (, "Mountains of Holy Light"), formerly known as Alma-Dağ, the ancient Mount Amanus (), medieval Black Mountain, or Jabal al-Lukkam in Arabic, is a mountain range in the Hatay Province of south-central Turkey. It begins sou ...

were usually thought to separate the regions of

Cilicia Cilicia () is a geographical region in southern Anatolia, extending inland from the northeastern coasts of the Mediterranean Sea. Cilicia has a population ranging over six million, concentrated mostly at the Cilician plain (). The region inclu ...

and

, although

at one point places the division further south at Ras al-Bassit (the classical Posidium).

Pollution

There is a lot of

heavy industry Heavy industry is an industry that involves one or more characteristics such as large and heavy products; large and heavy equipment and facilities (such as heavy equipment, large machine tools, huge buildings and large-scale infrastructure); o ...

around Iskenderun Bay, including five cement factories, ten steel factories, and three

coal-fired power station A coal-fired power station or coal power plant is a thermal power station which burns coal to generate electricity. Worldwide there are about 2,500 coal-fired power stations, on average capable of generating a gigawatt each. They generate ...

s: İsken Sugözü,

Atlas An atlas is a collection of maps; it is typically a bundle of world map, maps of Earth or of a continent or region of Earth. Advances in astronomy have also resulted in atlases of the celestial sphere or of other planets. Atlases have traditio ...

and Emba Hunutlu. The mountains around the bay trap air pollution, but because smokestack details are sent to the government unpublished, it is difficult to apportion responsibility for deaths and illnesses caused by air pollution in the area. The water too is polluted by land-based, shipping and fish farming activities.

References

Citations

Bibliography