Tabea lies at the seventy-eighth kilometre of the Denizli–Muğla road, about a kilometre south-west of the present town of Kale. The site has the look of a natural fortress, and the provincial culture and tourism directorate records that people were still living on the old castle until some thirty years before its account was written.
Tabea is one of the city states founded in Anatolia after Alexander the Great, and it has been settled without a break from the Hellenistic period to the present day. In antiquity it struck coins in its own name, first in silver and later in bronze.
On the acropolis, the building with niches cut into the rock stands to the north-east. It runs north to south and is rectangular in plan. Four niches are cut into the rock on the inner side of the eastern wall; there are none on the western side. Around the building and within it lie a piece of architrave, an altar and a column.
Judged by how it was built, the niched building should be dated to the Roman period, though it remained in use in the Seljuk and Ottoman periods as well.
Single-roomed houses cut into the rock are also found at the site.
When to go
- Climate
- Across Denizli as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from 6 °C in January to 27.5 °C in July; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in May, June, September and October; rainfall is heaviest in January (90 mm) and lightest in August (11 mm). Long-term means for 1957-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
