Urla

Education Minister Mahmut Özer has attended the inauguration ceremony of 1,500 village life centers, stating that the ministry has prioritized their projects about improving education in the country's villages.

Fishermen in the Aegean province of İzmir have caught a basking shark, which is 10 meters long and weighs 2 tons, while experts have criticized the hunting of this shark species, as it is in danger of extinction.

Fishermen threw nets into the sea to fish at night in the Urla district. In the morning, fishermen saw a 10-meter-long basking shark in their nets.

A magnitude 5.1 earthquake hit the Aegean Sea early on Nov. 30, according to Turkey's disaster agency AFAD. 

 The quake jolted the western Izmir province at 7 a.m. local time.

The epicenter of the quake was 56.18 kilometers (34.90 miles) from Urla district, with a depth of 3.97 kilometers (2.46 miles).

No casualties have been reported so far.

At least 782 irregular migrants were held across Turkey, local authorities said on Aug. 20. 

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Istanbul Governor Ali Yerlikaya said on Twitter that 436 irregular migrants, including 170 Afghan nationals, were held in 16 districts on Thursday.

They were handed over to the local migration office for deportation procedures, he added.

With Turkey lifting nationwide curfews and lockdowns as of July 1, local tourists have been flocking to some of the well-known tourism hubs in the Aegean region, giving a sigh of relief to the badly hit tourism industry that closed down for one and a half years during the pandemic.

Turkey rescued at least 109 asylum seekers aboard a faulty boat set to sail from a bay in Turkey's Aegean Izmir province.

Local gendarmerie teams learned that migrant smugglers were preparing to take asylum seekers to Italy by boat attached to a fishing port in the Karaburun district of Izmir.

A tender has been launched for the restoration of 16 buildings located on "Quarantine Island," one of the three quarantine islands registered in the world in the Aegean province of İzmir's Urla district.

The island, which spans an area of 323,000 square meters, was converted into a quarantine center amid an epidemic 155 years ago.

Turkey's main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu has slammed the arrest and removal of his party's district mayor for the Aegean province of İzmir, over alleged links to the FETÖ, the group behind the defeated coup attempt of 2016.

A mayor from Turkey's main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) was arrested over his suspected links to the FETÖ, the group behind the 2016 defeated coup attempt, a prosecutor's office said on Dec. 17.

İbrahim Burak Oğuz, the mayor of Urla district in the Aegean province of İzmir, is the first head of a CHP-run municipality to be arrested since the March 31 local elections.

Hasan Gürsoy opened the George Seferis Art Gallery in Urla, near Smyrna in Turkey, in honor of the Greek Nobel laureate. As a young boy, Seferis lived in the region until the age of 14 years, so when Gürsoy and his partners decided to open their gallery they decided to recognize the great Greek poet and thus pay tribute to the shared Greek-Turkish cultural past.