Fethiye, Turkey — Ghosts of the City of Light
Narrow gorges, modern ghost towns, a chimerical romance and Bellerophon’s tomb.
Wednesday, August 28th, 2013
I hoist myself out of the seawater and up the corroded metal ladder. Seven feet above the lapping waves I clamber onto a small concrete platform. A metal pole holds a light aloft as a warning to shipping. The turquoise waters of the Bay of Fethiye sparkle around me, surrounded on three sides by the dusty green sunbaked shores of south-western Turkey, fading to grey on one side and close enough for me to make out ant-like people on the nearer side. Halfway between my perch and the nearest land the 65-foot sailboat Lucky Mar rides cheerfully at anchor, and I can see my fellow passengers splashing playfully in the water alongside her, no doubt each with a can of Efes pilsner in one hand.
This concrete light platform sticks out of the sea like a little cork, a solid immovable cork that would no doubt break apart if you tried to pry it out.
As I sit there dripping, basking in the sun, I contemplate with regret that our journey is almost over. We’ve been sailing along the Lycian coast for four days, stopping in beautiful little coves and by delightful little islands. With no electricity for our cell phones, we’d been forced (god forbid!) to spend our evenings lingering over dinner with flowing conversation and learning to play backgammon … and in the case of certain passengers, really large amounts of Efes pilsner — though I must admit that I was singlehandedly responsible for the vessel running out of the licorice-flavored liquor raki.
Soon the outside world will close in, I’ll have to check my email and my text messages. It’s been a nice four days not thinking about the girl who set the winds blowing in my sails to come to her in Turkey, only to set me adrift here. Out on the water I couldn’t possibly hear from her, so I didn’t have to worry about the immutable tides of her feelings.
Presently I begin to tire of my stylite perch and clamber back down the rusty ladder to swim the gauntlet between myself and the Lucky Mar — the passage of small pleasure boats across my path lends a bit of a frogger-like challenge to it.
Soon we dock in the busy Fethiye marina, saying our goodbyes and settling up with the crew. But united now by four days of idyllic sailing, most of us book into the same hostel and walk together through the hot dry noontime sun to the archeological museum across town. Even being a huge fan of archeology (when I was wee I dreamed of becoming an archeologist) I don’t recall finding it to be overwhelmingly exciting, not sure I’d recommend it as a high priority to a visitor — certainly not compared to our next discovery.
One of my shipmates and read about a restaurant called “Pasha Kebab” in his Lonely Planet book. It didn’t disappoint! It turned out to have the very best food I’d tasted in Turkey other than what my (ex?)girlfriend and her parents had prepared. I ordered the number 58, and it was memorably delicious, whatever it was (literally, obviously I’ve got reference to my notes to write this but even if I hadn’t I could have told you from memory about the #58 at Pasha Kebab in Fethiye). [Now in 2024 Pasha Kebab is listed as “temporarily closed” so check its status before planning a trip to Fethiye]
That night we (former shipmates, four Australians, one Canadian and I (not yet an Australian at that time)) went out. One of the streets tucked behind the touristy market was packed with bars (oddly, one of them had a Route 66 theme), and we sat in the outdoor seating area enjoying the warm summer evening and the sweet smell of hookahs wafting on the breeze, ordering frou-frou cocktails.
Thursday, August 29th
Thursday morning I opened my laptop to check my email (in these dark ages of 2013 I didn’t have a smartphone yet!). There was word from The Girl, but it still seemed to be murky ominous clouds presaging storms, the distant rumble of thunder, tense seas.
Frowning, I turned my attention to the next local distraction, Saklıkent Gorge.
Getting on a bus (dolmis) with “Saklıkent” listed on a placard in the window along with its other destinations wasn’t hard. Everyone else on it was a local Turk and no one, not even the driver, spoke a word of English.
After we’d been driving for about two hours I started to become rather nervous. I knew Saklıkent wasn’t particularly close to Fethiye but this was getting a bit concerning. My anxiety had risen to a level nearing panic by the time we finally saw signs proclaiming we’d arrived at Saklıkent. A parking lot surrounded by stalls selling nicknacks, we had arrived!
Many restaurants with traditional low tables and cushions, as well as tree houses (which I suspect they just built to amuse tourists, surely they’re not a traditional thing?) clustered along the river, which emerged from a sheer cliff. To venture into the gorge, one must pay admission (20 lira, which was $9 at the time, if it’s still 20 lira that’s $0.66 now!). One enters along a raised wooden walkway over the raging torrent. A short way in the rush of water lessens, and one can safely wade across the ice-cold water. From here on, one is walking up the narrow canyon, sometimes on fine white sand, sometimes ankle-deep in chalky blue water, and sometimes armpit-deep in the frigid river. I put my wallet and phone in my upper breast pockets, and held my camera above my head. This kept it alive long enough to get the referenced pictures here, but sliding down a waterfall on the way back it got terminally splashed, and after that day it never worked again.
Splashing through the deep pools and over boulders was fun, though I found myself wishing I had someone to share the adventure with. The deeper into the crevice-like canyon I got, the fewer other people I encountered. In places one had to climb up little waterfalls and slippery smooth rockfaces. Eventually, I climbed a very difficult one and never saw anyone else after that. Now it was really exciting.
Finally, several kilometers up the narrow canyon, I arrived at the above boulder. On one side the water came splashing down in a waterfall, on the other a slimey foul-smelling rope led up to a narrow crack. I tried climbing it several times, I could get some purchase on some knots tied in it, and managed to drag myself up to where the rope disappeared into the crack but then there was nothing above to hold on to and nothing below to push myself up on.
As a sailor I felt it a point of pride not to be defeated by a rope-climbing obstacle, lord knows I don’t need a stair, but after several attempts, I concluded I was too likely to somehow injure myself in a place where help was very very far away. It appeared the light was starting to fade anyway, I didn’t need to follow in my parents’ footsteps and spend the night in a narrow canyon because I couldn’t get out in time (just about a year previous my parents had had to spend the night in Zion Narrows with only a plastic bag for a blanket, afterwords my mom deemed it an exciting adventure).
Friday, August 30th
Lying in bed is when it haunts you the most. I remembered the way she lay there gazing at me that first night in Egypt, her smile serene like a favorable breeze, her brown eyes warm like calm inviting waters you wouldn’t mind falling overboard into. That unbreaking steadfast gaze … how I missed those brown gazelle eyes.
Met some Australian girls during breakfast. Turkey is rife with Aussies. You run into them on three, four, six month holidays. Europe is so far from Australia that if they go there they’ve usually saved up their money and vacation days to spend a long time.
One of the girls was kind of cute, they were both friendly. It was their first day in town. I showed them around town, and led them to Pasha Kebab for lunch. Afterwards they were going to the beach, the cute one asked me if I was sure I wouldn’t join them, looking perhaps even a bit coy, but I shook my head. I had ghosts to pursue.
In 1923 Turkey expelled all Christians and deported them to Greece. Greece was supposed to send Turkey all its Muslims but it appears the order wasn’t enforced as mandatory on the Greek side and few Muslims came to replace the expelled “Greeks.” All Christians in Turkey were deemed to be “Greek,” which was often a surprise to people living as deep in Turkey as Cappadocia who had never been anywhere near Greece. To give you a sense of how this fundamentally changed the demographics of Anatolia, the Christian population of Turkey in 1914 was 20–25%, it is today 0.3–0.4% (the Armenian genocide also factors into this but I’m not going to get into that here). One of the Greek towns to be depopulated was Livissi, now known as Kayaköy, just a few kilometers from Fethiye. Fethiye itself carried the Greek name of Telmessos (“city of lights”) until in 1923 the Greek lights were extinguished and it was renamed Fethiye (“conquest”).
It was a quick and straightforward dolmis ride to Kayaköy. I stepped out onto a quiet cobblestone road, where large olive trees created pools of shade and restauranteurs like trap-door spiders lethargically waited for customers outside their little touristy open-air restaurants. In a semi-circle, like amphitheater seating, the crumbling ruins of Kayaköy lay around us. I followed the road up and soon found myself on a narrow cobbled road barely wide enough for a donkey-cart, that hadn’t been maintained since Kayaköy had abruptly ceased being a functional village in 1923. I’ve seen plenty of ruins in my travels, but never such an expansive and recent site. The whole village was there. Roofs gone, grass growing in living rooms, empty doorways, sometimes opening onto nothing where a wooden stairway had once been. Walking up the steep narrow stone road it was hard not to imagine what it must have been like with villagers carrying goods up and down, dogs lying carelessly in the road, children running around, laundry hung up to dry. It’s no wonder it inspired Louis de Bernières (famous for Captain Corelli’s Mandolin) to write Birds Without Wings about exactly that, the final days of this village. Next to a former chapel on a hilltop overlooking the village a red Turkish flag proudly flutters in the breeze.
At one end of town, there’s a big Greek church, which apparently has some pretty Byzantine-style mosaics on the floor. Its doors were closed with modern metal gates, signs advising it would soon be open as a museum [it is now listed as such on google]. While the most recent occupation of the village was 1923, some of the buildings, such as at least one of the churches, are as much as 500 years old.
I returned by dolmis to Fethiye. Stopped by a ticket office to buy tickets to visit the Greek island of Rhodes the next day, but was informed there weren’t any ferries that day. This flummoxed my plan a bit, and I started walking toward the Lycian tombs hewn into the rock behind Fethiye to watch the sunset, I’d heard there was lovely view from up there.
As I walked along the road above the cliff, with the city stretching off below me to my left in the warm twilight glow and tall pine trees on my right, I received a text message, my first in several weeks.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Walking to the tombs overlooking Fethiye,” I say, “why?”
The tombs have these huge monolithic facades with columns, and a door in the middle. So of course one is expecting a huge room on the inside, but within the doorway, there is actually just a closet-sized room the size of the door — and it smells like piss because humanity in general can’t be trusted not to piss on ancient ruins.
They say one of the tombs belongs to the ancient hero Bellerophon, who traveled across Turkey on the winged horse Pegasus, slew the fire-breathing Chimera, and finally came to rest here. I traveled across Turkey on the Pegasus bus line, roasted hot dogs on the Chimera’s fire, and now here I am contemplating his tomb.
“I’ll come to where you are,” she says.
The sun is setting over the bay, bathing the cliff face in soft pink light and the rooftops below me in an orange glow. There are two tortoises slowly trundling along the hillside in front of the tombs.
“Nah I’m done looking at the tombs,” I say blithely, as I try to line up a photograph with a tortoise right in front of the tomb. “I was thinking of going to Gallipoli tomorrow, let’s meet there.” It’s about 9 hours by bus south from her in Istanbul, 12 hours north from me.
“Tomorrow?” she asks. I’m walking back now. Lights are starting to come on in the city below.
“Yeah I’ll take the overnight bus” I say while looking at the menu of a little restaurant perched precariously above the cliff. They don’t have an English version of their menu, which is one of the best auguries I could ask for in endorsing their food — the less touristy the better I say. The owner comes out and translates his menu for me, and makes a recommendation. It’s delicious. He won’t accept a tip. “Turkish hospitality!” he insists.
Lights are twinkling all across the city as I continue my walk, a city of lights below me. And she’s already purchased her ticket to Gallipoli. As unpredictable and uncontrollable as the sea itself, but maybe the tempest has passed.
[To be continued! But since I don’t anticipate a strong romance arc in the next segment and it might be confusing with my current romantic status I’ll just spoiler alert the future for you, this romance proved only chimerical, we ultimately broke up, but are still good friends. As you may recall from my more recent travel stories I have a more successful romance arc now and in fact her visa to come join me in Australia was just finally granted!]
