What stands at Kayaköy is not an ancient city but an abandoned twentieth-century town. The ministry is explicit: all the groups of buildings running up the slope were put up by Greeks who settled here in the late Ottoman period.
In the founding years of the Turkish Republic the Greeks living in the region were exchanged with Turks from western Thrace, and the emptied town's timber doors, windows and roofs decayed in the weather until the place took on the look of a ghost town.
The houses repay attention. None is larger than fifty square metres; they are placed so that no house blocks another's light or view; the lower floors are generally cellars; and at the entrances are underground cisterns collecting rainwater from the roofs. Besides the houses there are many chapels, two large churches, a school building and a customs house.
The site does have a deeper past — it was known as Karmylassos in antiquity, and philological evidence takes the place back to the third millennium BC — but no find older than the fourth century BC has yet been recovered here. Kayaköy lies eight kilometres south of Fethiye and is reached by private car.
Getting there
- Access
- Eight kilometres from Fethiye in Muğla; reached by private car.
When to go
- Climate
- Across Muğla as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from 10.8 °C in January to 27.6 °C in August; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in April, May, June, September, October and November; rainfall is heaviest in December (207 mm) and lightest in August (4 mm). Long-term means for 2001-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
Visiting hours
- Hours
- 08:30 - 18:00
