Shamballa Cruising Yacht Club: Travel with Friends III – Fethiye, Kayakoy, Tlos and Seklikand Canyon

Sadly our planned 6 day sailing trip to Fethiye and its beautiful bay was cut short by a dodgy windlass motor. After two nights in Ekinçek we sailed (motored) back to Yat Marine and decided to rent a car and do the sights by land.

The first day in Fethiye we decided to give D & T a bit more water time with a Gulet trip around the bay. Bob and I had done this last year and loved it. This year tourism was down so we had a Gulet with only about half the people on it compared to last year – very nice for us but not so for the tour operators. The staff were fantastic and the stops for swimming lovely. We got to see different areas of the bay and had a thoroughly enjoyable day.

Fethiye from the water

One of the crew contemplating the views

T jumping from the deck

Our lunch being prepared

The next day was a long sightseeing day visiting Kayaköy, Tlos and Seklikand Canyon. Just 8 km outside of Fethiye lays the ghost town of Kayaköy. The once sizeable and prosperous town was emptied of its Greek Christian inhabitants as part of the population exchange between Turkey and Greece at the end of WWI. Kayaköy is a bitter-sweet, eerie place and that time a sad period in history for both countries. Kayaköy was the site which inspired Louis de Bernières for his 2004 novel Birds Without Wings. In 2014, Kayaköy also was the setting for the closing scenes of Russell Crowe's film The Water Diviner'. The town was much bigger than I expected and I would have appreciated more signage describing the inhabitants of the abandoned homes, a way to bring the ghosts to life.

Kayakoy

Old church with mosaic courtyard

Could be a scene from 100 years ago

Village women making gözleme

We got lost trying to find Seklikand Canyon and ended up spending over an hour driving through winding narrow mountainous road that gave us the serendipitous opportunity to observe some fascinating examples of remote Turkish agriculture. The lanes were lined with pomegranate and olive trees, goats roamed in the fields and numerous times we had to pull over to let tractors go by.

Pomegranate

We went full circle and returned to Tlos. Tlos is an ancient Lycian city with settlement on the site dating back 4000 years. The site has been continuously occupied by Lycians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines and Ottoman Turks and the ruins give wonderful examples of all these periods. New relics are still being unearthed. Magnificent marble statues of Roman Emperors on display at the Fethiye museum were discovered at Tlos only 4 years ago.

Close-up of the sculpture of Emperor Hadrian? excavated in 2011

Amphitheatre and mountain backdrop

Old Ottoman fort

Walls and buildings of Tlos

Tombs and ruins

At the roadside cafe at Tlos we got directions to Seklikand Canyon (we were only a few km away when we circled around the mountain roads) and decided to have another go. Taking the correct route, it only took 15 minutes to drive to the canyon. The site was well worth the effort. The canyon is a slit through Taurus Mountains, the water literally pouring through cracks in the sheer mountainside to join the Xanthos River.