İmralı is a small Turkishprison island in the south of the Sea of Marmara, west of the Armutlu-Bozburun peninsula within Bursa Province. It measures in the north-south direction with a width of, and has an area of. The highest peak is Türk Tepesi at an altitude of above sea level. It is prohibited to fly over it or fish near its shores.
History
The Roman authors Pliny the Elder and Strabo called the island Besbicus. It was later known as Kalonymos and Kalolimnos. In antiquity, it was a member of the Delian League since it appears in tribute records of Athens between 434/3 and 418/7 BCE. The Turkish nameİmralı derives from the name of the island's conqueror, Emir Ali, one of the first Ottoman admirals. In 1308 İmralı became the first island to be conquered by the newly established Ottoman Navy. Its strategic location enabled the Ottomans to control the movement of ships in the Sea of Marmara with a naval base established on it, cutting the Byzantine Empire's connection to Bursa. In 1913 the island had 250 houses, a school, three monasteries, and 1,200 residents, all of whom were Greeks. The economic activity of the island's residents consisted mainly of fishing and farming onions, with most of the grown onions sold to Istanbul. There were three Greek villages on the island until the Turkish War of Independence, engaged mostly in growing grapes, winemaking, silk production and fishing. The island was mostly uninhabited from the 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey until 1935, when a semi-open category prison was built. The prisoners earned money by working in agriculture and fishing. One well-known islander was Kimon Friar who emigrated to the United States and became a scholar and translator of Greek language poetry. There is a military base on the island, and the area around the island is a forbidden zone. It served from 1999 until 2009 as a maximum-security prison island for its only inmate, Abdullah Öcalan the leader of the PKK. The other prisoners on the island were transferred elsewhere so that Öcalan was the island's sole prisoner. In November 2009, several other prisoners were transferred to a newly-constructed building on the island, where Öcalan is incarcerated.
