Kekova is the name of a stretch of the Lycian coast in Antalya, not of a town or a single ancient city. The name comes from its largest island, which runs alongside the shore and forms a channel, and around it lie smaller islands, many bays and remains of Lycian settlements, some of them under water. Land access is limited, and its shores are reached by boat. On the mainland beside it are two places to know: Simena, now Kaleköy, and Theimiussa at Üçağız.
What Kekova is
Antalya is about 200 kilometres to the east and Fethiye about 250 to the west. Besides Kekova island, the area includes Kişnali Ada, Aşırlı Ada, Toprak Ada and İç Ada. Its value is natural as well as archaeological, with a grooved coast and distinctive geology, marine life and plant cover. The Kaş-Kekova special environmental protection area covers it, and UNESCO has had it on the tentative list since 2000. That is a candidacy and not an inscription.
The sunken settlements
Settlements around the island have slipped below the surface, and along the water's edge stand Lycian sarcophagi with the sea around them, tombs inscribed in Lycian, and the remains of a breakwater and buildings. To the north there is a necropolis of sarcophagi and a few rock tombs, and across the area you will find rock tombs and water cisterns as well.
Simena, reached from the sea
Simena occupies a peninsula on the coast between Kaş and Demre, directly facing Kekova island, and Türkiye has few other settlements that are reached from the sea. Earthquakes in antiquity damaged the city and sent part of it under water, which explains the steps that run down into the sea at the shore, together with sarcophagi and a breakwater.
Pliny, writing in the first century AD, is the earliest to name it, but a silver coin found at Aperlai and a Lycian inscription carry its story back to the fourth century BC. Aperlai represented Simena in the Lycian League. Once the region was part of the Roman empire, Simena went on as an independent city. On the shore are the ruined baths whose inscription records a dedication to the emperor Titus from Aperlai's people and council along with other league cities.
The castle above, used in the Middle Ages, is the first thing you notice from the water. A steep path climbs to it with occasional steps, passing sarcophagi set among the houses, including one whose epitaph names Mentor, son of İdargus. At the top the surprise is a rock-cut theatre with seven rows, enough for about three hundred people. The walk ends among cisterns, rock tombs and a building that served as temple, church and mosque in turn.
Theimiussa at Üçağız
Unlike the islands, Theimiussa can be reached by road, with a turn to the south 20 kilometres along the Kaş-Demre road, and it needs your own vehicle. An inscription shows that it was a village and not a city in the administrative sense, and the fines named in grave inscriptions, payable to Myra or Kyaneai, suggest a maritime community dependent on those cities.
Ruins start where the houses thin out on the east side of the village. On the shore is a miniature fortress of rusticated masonry, later widened in the Byzantine period into a wall around the settlement. East of the jetty, set back a little, a pair of house-type rock tombs has lost its doorways. The eastern one shows a young man or boy at its right side, and a Lycian inscription above the door gives the owner's name, Kluwanimi. Beyond it a channel runs between two cut-stone walls, lined with Late Hellenistic and Roman sarcophagi, and ends at an Early Byzantine structure whose purpose is unknown. Theimiussa is one of the Lycian cities nominated in 2009 for the UNESCO World Heritage List.
