Lycia & the Turquoise Coast

Who the Lycians were

Lycia is the mountainous bulge of coast between Fethiye and Antalya. Its people spoke their own language, wrote it in their own alphabet, and ran the first federation in history with proportional voting: the Lycian League, which the framers of the American constitution later read about in Montesquieu. Homer has them fighting for Troy under Sarpedon, which puts them here by 1200 BC.

They are remembered above all for their tombs. Lycians carved graves into cliffs in the shape of timber houses, with beam ends and doors in stone, and raised others on tall pillars or in stone sarcophagi with pointed lids. Every town on this coast has a cliff full of them, and the earliest predate Alexander.

The rock-cut churches of Cappadocia are a much later chapter of the same habit.

The land was never easy to hold. Xanthos burned itself down twice rather than surrender, first to the Persians around 540 BC and again to Brutus in 42 BC. Rome absorbed the region in AD 43, and the theaters, baths and harbors you walk through now are mostly Roman work on Lycian foundations.

Xanthos and Letoon

Xanthos was the Lycian capital, on a hill above the Eşen river 60 km southeast of Fethiye. The Roman theater sits beside two pillar tombs, one of them the Harpy Tomb whose reliefs are copies; Charles Fellows shipped the originals to the British Museum in 1842, along with the Nereid Monument. What remains is still the best single Lycian site.

Letoon, 4 km away, was the federation's religious center, with three temples to Leto, Apollo and Artemis. A trilingual inscription found here in 1973, in Lycian, Greek and Aramaic, was the key to reading the Lycian language. The two sites share one UNESCO listing from 1988.

Inland from Xanthos, Sidyma sits in a mountain village where Roman tombs stand among the houses and a Byzantine emperor, Marcian, later crowned in Constantinople, once recovered from fever as a young soldier. Pınara and Tlos are the other hill cities, each with a tomb-filled cliff and a theater. Saklıkent gorge, 18 km long and cold even in August, is the swim afterward.

Myra and the Kekova coast

Demre is modern Myra, 45 km east of Kaş. The rock tombs here are the most photographed on the coast, stacked up the cliff behind a large Roman theater.

St. Nicholas was bishop of Myra in the fourth century. The church that held his tomb stands in the town, rebuilt many times on the same domed-basilica plan as Hagia Sophia at a fraction of the size, and still visited by pilgrims every December.

Andriace was Myra's harbor. St. Paul changed ships here in AD 60 on his way to Rome, and the granary Hadrian built in 129 still stands on the beach with its walls intact.

Between Kaş and Demre lies Kekova, a long island sheltering a strip of water where an earthquake in the second century dropped the town of Simena into the sea. You can see walls and stairs under the surface from a boat; swimming over the ruins is banned. Kaleköy, the village on the mainland shore, has a small castle with a Lycian sarcophagus in the water below it and no road in.

Üçağız, the harbor village, is the safe anchorage for the whole area. Aperlae on the Sıcak peninsula and Theimussa at Üçağız itself add two more sets of tombs for those who want them.

Kaş and Fethiye

Kaş was Antiphellos, a small Lycian port whose Hellenistic theater faces the sea and whose sarcophagi stand in the town's streets. Today it is the coast's diving and kayaking town, with a Greek island, Kastellorizo, 2 km offshore. Kalkan, 25 km west, is the quieter, more expensive neighbor above a steep harbor.

Fethiye was Telmessos, and its rock tombs, above all the Ionic-fronted Tomb of Amyntas from the fourth century BC, look down on the modern harbor. The town is the western gate of the region: Dalaman airport is 50 km away, Ölüdeniz lagoon is 15 km, and most gulets leave from here or from Göcek. Its covered fish market, where you buy at one stall and have the fish grilled at the next, is the coast's best introduction to the Turkish table.

Antalya, Perge and Aspendos

Antalya is the region's city and airport, 150 km east of Demre. Kaleiçi, the walled old town, wraps around a Roman harbor below Hadrian's Gate, built for the emperor's visit in 130. The archaeological museum holds the statues from Perge and is the best on the coast.

The fluted Yivli Minare beside the old town, built around 1230, is Seljuk work, the same dynasty whose capital was Konya.

Perge, 17 km east, was a Hittite town called Parha before it became a Greek one. Alexander used it as a base in 333 BC. The colonnaded street, the stadium and the round Hellenistic towers are all standing, and the site is flat and easy to walk in an hour.

Aspendos, 45 km from Antalya, has the most complete Roman theater in existence, built under Marcus Aurelius around 160 by the architect Zeno. Its stage building rises to the full height of the seating. Termessos, in the mountains behind Antalya at 1,000 m, is the wild alternative, a city the Romans never bothered to conquer.

The Blue Voyage

A gulet is a broad wooden motor-sailer, 20 to 30 m long, built in the yards of Bodrum and Fethiye. It carries 6 to 16 guests in cabins, a crew of three or four, and a cook. The boat anchors in a different bay each night, and days pass in swimming, reading and short walks ashore to ruins.

The writer Cevat Şakir, the Fisherman of Halicarnassus, gave the trip its name in the 1950s.

The classic route runs from Fethiye or Göcek east to Kekova and back. The Gulf of Fethiye alone has twelve islands and a dozen sheltered inlets, from Kızılada and Sövalye near the town to the coves of Göcek. Beyond Cape Kurtoğlu the boat passes Ölüdeniz, Butterfly Valley and the long beach at Patara, then Kalkan and Kaş, before reaching Üçağız and Kekova.

A four-day trip covers Fethiye to Kekova one way. Seven days does the round trip with afternoons ashore at Myra, Kaş and the Gulf of Fethiye. Longer voyages continue west to Marmaris, Datça and Bodrum, the Carian coast covered on the Aegean sheet, or east past Olympos and Phaselis to Antalya.

The season runs May to late October, with June and September the best months. Afternoons bring a steady west wind, so boats move in the morning and anchor by two. Bring a sun hat, soft shoes for deck, and cash for the ruins.

Practical notes

Fly to Dalaman for the western half of the coast and Antalya for the eastern half. A rental car is the best way to string the sites together; the coast road is slow but never far from the sea. The Lycian Way, a waymarked trail of 540 km, links most of the places on this sheet for walkers.

The kitchen here is fish, meze and citrus; see Turkish cuisine. Lycia is one stop on a longer route, and the chronology that makes its tombs and theaters legible is on the history sheet. From Antalya the road north climbs to Konya and Pamukkale, and the flight to Istanbul takes 75 minutes.

Questions