Fethiye has been an important settlement since very early times. In antiquity the city belonged to the Lycians — a name the district governorship glosses as the people of the land of light — and it was known as Telmessos.
Its rulers followed the pattern of the whole coast. Telmessos passed to the Persians in 545 BC and surrendered to Alexander in 333 BC. After Alexander's death it spent a period under Ptolemy of Egypt before falling to Rome, and in the Roman period the town was called Makri, or Meğri — the far country. When the empire divided, Meğri stayed inside the Eastern Roman, or Byzantine, world.
The Turkish period began in 1282, when Menteşe Bey, one of the founders of the Menteşe principality, took Meğri from the Byzantines. It was annexed to Ottoman territory in 1424. Under the Ottomans the town — known locally as Beş Kaza — was made a kaza attached to the Menteşe liva in 1874.
The modern name is barely ninety years old. With the founding of the Republic the district was attached to Muğla, and in 1934 it was renamed Fethiye in memory of Fethi Bey, one of Türkiye's first pilots, who took off from Damascus in 1913 and was killed when his aircraft was brought down near Tiberias. The places below — the rock tombs above the town, Ölüdeniz, Kayaköy and the ancient cities of the district — each have their own page.
