Lycia is the ancient name of the Tekke Peninsula, the part of southern Türkiye that pushes out into the Mediterranean on the coast from Fethiye to Antalya, and the ancient cities of the Lycians are spread along it. Xanthos, once the capital of Lycia and now on the UNESCO World Heritage List, lies four kilometres from Letoon, the religious centre of Lycia. Patara, where Saint Nicholas was born, has a beach beside it on which loggerhead turtles nest. Tlos and Pınara have hillsides cut with rock tombs, Myra and its harbour Andriake are in Demre, Limyra and Arykanda are in Finike, and the harbour towns of Olympos and Phaselis lie inside the coastal national park. A waymarked footpath, the Lycian Way, joins much of this coast. Visiting details for every city are on its page on this site.
Who the Lycians were
The guide to the Lycian Way describes the Lycians as independent and democratic, ready to fight and with their own art, and says their place on the sea drew them into trade and sometimes into piracy. Their language survives in the old names of their cities: Lycian inscriptions call Tlos Tlawa and Pınara Pinale, and Limyra was Zemuri. Patara appears as Patar as early as the thirteenth century BC, in Hittite texts.
The cities acted together through the Lycian League, and their votes were not equal. Myra was one of six leading members holding three votes each, Strabo counted Olympos among the leaders with three as well, and Antiphellos had only one. In AD 43, under Claudius, Lycia became a Roman province.
Xanthos and Letoon
Xanthos stands at the village of Kınık in Kaş district, on two hills commanding the plain: the walled Lycian acropolis, a steep crag above the Eşen stream, and north of it the Roman acropolis, higher and wider. The Iliad says the Lycian leaders Glaucus and Sarpedon came from the country of the river Xanthos. Around 545 BC the Persians under Harpagus took the city, and historians tell of it being levelled or burned many times and rebuilt on the ashes. Among its rock tombs and sarcophagi, look for the pillar tombs that belong to Lycian culture alone. The Nereid Monument is in London, taken to the British Museum in the 1840s by Charles Fellows.
Letoon, near Kumluova, was the religious centre of Lycia, with finds going back to the seventh century BC. Three temples stand in a row: Leto's, in the Ionic order, to the west, a smaller one for Artemis in the middle and Apollo's to the east.
Patara
Patara lasted because of where it stands: it was the only place in the Xanthos valley that opened onto the sea. The Seleucids, who took it early in the second century BC, governed Lycia from here, and under Rome the governors heard legal cases in the city while its harbour stored grain bound for Rome. Patara was known for an oracle of Apollo; Saint Nicholas was born here, and at the Council of Nicaea in 325 the one signature for Lycia was that of Eudemos of Patara.
You enter through a triumphal gate built, its inscription suggests, around AD 100 for the province's governor. The theatre is set against Kurşunlu Tepe, and the hill is the best spot to take in the whole site; on it stand the harbour buildings, the main street, a Corinthian temple and the bath of Vespasian. The council house, just north of the theatre, is where Patara held its assemblies as capital. The Antalya directorate of culture and tourism calls the beach in front of the ancient city the widest and longest in Türkiye, reaching 800 metres across, with dunes behind it.
Tlos, Pınara and Sidyma
Tlos, at Yakaköy, counts among the oldest settlements of Lycia. People lived there continuously from Neolithic times until the Iron Age, the city remained one of Lycia's leading bishoprics into the twelfth century, and in the eighteenth it still lay where the region's trade routes crossed. On the flat below its acropolis run Lycian walls nine metres wide, and the agora keeps a gate of six arches. At Pınara, one house-type tomb on the cliff carries reliefs of a walled city, which is Pınara itself; it is thought to have been a prince's grave. At Sidyma, in Seydikemer, a stoa from the reign of Claudius rises in the middle of the village with its columns still upright, beside a temple of Artemis built in the same years.
Kaş and Üçağız
Kaş stands on the remains of Antiphellos, a Greek name meaning the place opposite Phellos, the stony land. Phellos stands on Felen Dağı north-east of the town, and once trade gained weight in the Hellenistic period the harbour it had founded grew while the mother city declined. The sarcophagus to look for there is a carved limestone one of 385–350 BC, showing its owner reclining on a couch, cup in hand. Theimiussa, at Üçağız, was a village rather than a city; on one of a pair of house-type rock tombs east of the jetty, a Lycian inscription names the owner, Kluwanimi. Phellos, Theimiussa and Arykanda are among the Lycian cities proposed for the World Heritage List in 2009.
Myra and Andriake (Demre)
Myra is named for the Myros, known today as the Demre, and the silt that river carried is what finally buried the city. Its best years were 408 to 450, under Theodosius II, when Myra was the metropolis of Lycia; after its capture in 809 it lost its importance. Its coins show its Artemis in the form of Cybele, which is why the ministry calls Myra the place where Cybele became Artemis. Go for the reliefs above the rock tombs on either side of the theatre and in the river necropolis.
Andriake, Myra's harbour at Çayağzı, was a city in its own right by around 200 BC. Its most important building is Hadrian's granary, 65 by 32 metres, with eight rooms behind eight doors and busts of Hadrian and Sabina beside the central entrance. It survives to its roof and now houses the Museum of Lycian Civilisations, whose eight rooms of finds from excavations across Lycia are laid out by subject, from history and geography to inscriptions, economic and social life, and religion.
Limyra and Arykanda (Finike)
Limyra, at Saklısu in Finike, was Lycia's capital under King Perikles in the first half of the fourth century BC, and his heroon on the acropolis recalls the Nereid Monument of Xanthos. More than four hundred rock tombs ring the city, most of them known by name from Lycian inscriptions. In the lower city stands the monument to Gaius Caesar, adopted son of Augustus, who died at Limyra on the journey back to Rome; it was built in AD 4 and never held his ashes.
Arykanda, in Arif village, falls in terraces below the rock face called Şahinkaya, and its Lycian name, Ary-ka-wanda, is read as the place by the high rocks. The terraces set out the city from top to bottom: the stadium of the first century AD, then a small theatre that the ministry rates the region's best preserved, then the agora and the odeon. In the East Necropolis, second-century monument tombs stand in tiers.
Olympos and Phaselis
Olympos, in Kumluca, straddles its stream, with buildings on the north and south banks. In the first century BC the pirate Zeniketes held a stronghold near it, and when Publius Servilius Vatia besieged him he set fire to himself and his family rather than be taken; Olympos was expelled from the League and readmitted only in the first century AD. Look for the polygonal walls of the South City and, on a cistern wall by the Byzantine church, a ship drawn in madder. Phaselis, founded by Rhodians in 690 BC with three harbours, met Alexander with a golden crown; its main street, 125 metres long and 20 wide, is paved over a sewer system.
The Lycian Way
Kate Clow researched and marked the Lycian Way in 1999. It runs 760 km, about 35 days, from Ölüdeniz to Geyikbayırı, mostly on Roman roads, mule tracks and old footpaths, and passes some 25 remote historic sites, and it takes in the St Nicholas Ways, a web of paths between the ruins of Byzantine monasteries in the hills over Demre. The ground is stony and steep, and spring or autumn suits it best; apart from three high stretches, walkers find a village house, pension or small hotel for each night.
