5/31 – 6/1/17
At first, the highway that leads east from Antalya is an easy drive: four lanes, straight, more or less level. Then, after 100 kilometers or so, the hazy horizon of mountains rushes forward to meet the Mediterranean coast. In the ensuing topographical scrum, the road narrows to two lanes and climbs a thousand feet or so. Thereafter, the highway from Antalya becomes one of the most scenic and frustrating thoroughfares in Turkey. The speed limit is posted at a reasonable 70 kph; but the many trucks grinding up and down its undersized lanes move at a small fraction of this pace. And so, on a road that consists exclusively of switchbacks and hairpin turns, you are forced to pass almost constantly, operating on blind faith and a whining four-cylinder engine.
Under these conditions, as may be imagined, it was a pleasure to get off the road whenever possible. I stopped at no fewer than four archaeological sites, which had in common only their proximity to the road, a connection to classical antiquity, and (as it turned out) general neglect. The first of these was Iotape. The ruins were underwhelming; but the site, located on a peninsula jutting into the turquoise Mediterranean, was stunning. After a pleasant half-hour of clambering over tumbled walls, I ate lunch on a cliff overlooking the sea.
Selinus, site number two, was a waste of time. The dirt road up to the ruins was so bad that I worried about the undercarriage of my car; the parking space (a slight widening of the road) was littered with fist-sized rocks; and the informational sign was bleached beyond legibility. Reaching the acropolis required a climb of more than 600 steps – and the view from the top contrived to be unimpressive. The rest of the ancient city was drowned in thorny scrub. About all that can be said for Selinus was that it made me miss the drive.
I got badly lost when trying to find my third stop, Antiochia ad Cragum. The site, when I finally reached it, was quite impressive, and featured substantial remains of the Roman city center and a Byzantine fort. It also featured an elderly bekci (caretaker), who – despite not knowing a word of English – insisted on giving me a tour of the site. I understood roughly a quarter of what was said, but nodded and smiled encouragingly throughout. I suspect that I was his first visitor in a very long time.
It was evening by the time I reached Anemurium, my last site. This was a pity, since I would have liked to linger. The Roman and Byzantine ruins were remarkably well-preserved, and appealingly sited along a sand beach. The vast necropolis was especially impressive: hundreds of mausoleums, uniformly of dull gray stone, stood rank on rank, sending long shadows toward the sea.
The rest was all driving: more mountains, more serpentine highway, more trucks to pass. It was nearly 9 by the time I found my hotel in the deserted resort town of Kizkilise. The tourism slump has hit hard here: I am the only guest at my hotel, and was the only customer at the excellent fish restaurant where I ate dinner. The lights were off along the boardwalk as I walked back, leaving the beach to the stray dogs and me.
6-1
Kizkilise, a fairly unassuming beach resort, is located in the middle of what might be Turkey’s densest cluster of Roman and Byzantine sites. Hoping to sample everything in range, I got an early start up the winding, not-quite-two-lane road to Uzuncaburc. Along the way, I caught sight of two spectacular Roman mausoleums a short distance from the road. Pulling off, I found a path that led in the right direction – and promptly found myself wandering in somebody’s olive grove. A dog began barking in the distance. Scrambling hastily over a stone wall, I found myself in a small clearing with the tombs. Though robbed in antiquity and rattled by millennia of earthquakes, they were impressive structures. Climbing up to the second story of the better-preserved mausoleum, I found the main sarcophagus in place, lid still guarded by two weathered lions.
Uzuncaburc is a small farming village built into the ruins of the Roman city of Diocaesarea. The ruins are impressive and well-preserved; but their allure lies in the nonchalant way they have been incorporated into the modern town. When I pulled up, an elderly villager and his wife were working on a pickup beneath a Roman monumental gate. On either side, houses built entirely from ancient masonry lined streets that meandered past lines of columns, an ancient theater, and a large temple of Zeus.
The most impressive ruin was a colossal, if rather unstable-looking, ancient tower on the outskirts of the village.
My next stop was Olba, a large Roman town in the territory of Diocaesarea. Here again, relics of the ancient world were scattered profusely through a modern village – an agora beside the tea house, the theater in somebody’s backyard, monumental tombs turned chicken coops. I don’t think they get many tourists out here: on my way out, an elderly local tried to hitch a ride with me back to Silifke because (if I understood his Turkish) “there are very few cars here.”
Having managed to forestall becoming a rural taxi service, I stopped on a remote country road near Unzuncaburc to eat a furtive lunch. Since it is now Ramadan, I try to avoid the faux pas of eating publicly when everyone else in fasting. This time, I didn’t quite succeed – as I strolled down the dirt lane, apple in hand, to check out a large tomb, an elderly peasant woman emerged suddenly from a nearby grove, carrying a massive bundle of sticks. Apple poised halfway to my mouth, I grinned sheepishly. She grunted and trudged on.
I had a run-in with another elderly Turkish lady a half-hour later, when trying to make my way through Silifke without killing anyone. This was a real challenge. If Turks are aggressive drivers, they are absolutely fearless pedestrians. The worst offenders are children and the elderly – the kids because they don’t know any better, the pensioners because they couldn’t care less. At one intersection, an old woman begin shuffling in front of my car just as the light turned green. She stopped; and, before toddling on, shot me a piercing glance that said, plain as words, “go ahead, tourist: make my day.” I didn’t rush her.
Back toward Kizkilise, I stopped at Cennet ve Cehennem (Heaven and Hell), two limestone caves located at the bottom of a deep sinkhole. Contrary to most theologies, Heaven is the easier of the two to reach. Although the cave wasn’t especially remarkable, I had fun photographing the small Byzantine chapel at the cave mouth against the sliver of blue sky visible beyond. The 400-odd steps out of the sinkhole were somewhat less fun.
While driving across a scrubby plain to my next destination, I happened to notice a cluster of ruins a few hundred yards from the road. Reflexively pulling over, I waded through thorn bushes and waist-high weeds to the remains of what proved to be a substantial Byzantine village, centered on a well-preserved church. As I walked through the site, I savored the isolation of the place, high above the glittering Mediterranean. Remoteness, however, has its drawbacks: I saw considerable evidence of recent looting, including a freshly-opened chamber tomb.
A few miles down the road, a rutted dirt track led me to the trail to Adamkaylar, a series of Roman reliefs carved into the wall of a remote canyon. The climb down, following former goat paths and ancient stone-carved steps, was nothing short of treacherous. About halfway to the bottom of the four hundred foot canyon, the trail leveled off, following a broad ledge. A few hundred yards from the steps were the reliefs I had come to see: about a dozen life-size portraits of Roman worthies carved into the cliff face. The portraits, more stylized than finely rendered, were not artistically impressive; but in that lonely canyon, filled with echoing birdcalls, they were strikingly evocative.
The next site I visited – Kanlidivane, the ancient Kanytelis – was equally haunting. Centered on a yawning sinkhole with blood-red walls, which was believed to be an entrance to the underworld, Kanytelis was less a proper city than a settlement that existed to service the many temples built along the sinkhole’s rim. In late antiquity, the inertia of local piety ensured that a series of large churches replaced the temples. Later, after the settlement had been abandoned, a legend grew up that criminals had been cast into the pit – whence its Turkish name, which means “the place of bloody madness.” As I walked around the site, the walls of the pit, glowing in the late afternoon light, lent a reddish cast to the pale walls of the temples and tombs.
On my way back to Kizkilise, I stopped to visit the much more cheerful ruins of Sebaste. Although a dig seemed to be underway in a large Roman gymnasium at one end of the site, there wasn’t much to see. I spent a pleasant half-hour, however, strolling through the ruins of the harbor, where sand drifted over tumbled columns and shapeless piles of masonry. At one point, my boots rasped over a sand-streaked mosaic floor exposed by the scoring wind.
I’d had about my fill of ruins by this point. But the sight of a large stone building in the scrub just outside Kizkilise roused the old instincts, and I reflexively turned down a rutted gravel road for a quick look. What followed was the most fascinating walk of my trip to date. The ruins I had spotted belonged to large late antique church. As I crashed toward the building through the usual thorny scrub, I paused for a few photos of the gray stone walls, crimsoned by the setting sun, against the glittering Mediterranean. On reaching the basilica, I found a shepherd leading his flock down the ruined nave.
From atop the heaped ruins of the apse, I could see another large building a few hundred yards away. This proved to be another late antique basilica, even better preserved than its neighbor. Little but the wooden roof was missing – not bad, for a building abandoned since the Middle Ages. I entered through the courtyard, and made way over piles of rubble into the remains of the nave. Shadow cast far ahead by the sun setting at my back, tall grass sighing at my passage, I walked up a jumble of fallen columns to the central apse. Besides the distant murmur of traffic on the coastal highway, the only sound was the chirping of crickets.
Racing the fading light, I continued west into a vast necropolis. Most of the sarcophagi – marked with crosses and unsteady Greek script of late antiquity – belonged, like the basilicas, to the era of Justinian, the last great flowering of the ancient world. Clambering over stone fences and wading through wheat fields, I encountered the ruins of still more churches, and countless sarcophagi outlined against the setting sun.
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