Kaunos

High on a sheer cliff above the reed-lined Dalyan River, the façades of rock-cut tombs look out over the water like small temples, with columns, pediments and doorways carved straight into the stone. These are the tombs of Kaunos, an ancient port city whose ruins lie on the hills just across the river from the town of Dalyan, in south-western Turkey.

Kaunos stood on the border between two ancient regions: the river, known in antiquity as the Calbys, divided Caria from Lycia, and the city mixed influences from both. Legend credits its foundation to a king named Kaunos, a grandson of Apollo, while archaeology shows habitation back to at least the ninth century BC. Herodotus records that the people of Kaunos resisted the Persian general Harpagus in 546 BC. The city flourished most under the Carian satrap Mausolus in the fourth century BC, who gave it new walls, an agora and temples to Greek gods. The rock tombs date from the fourth to the second centuries BC; their temple-like fronts, often described as Lycian-style, are carved in a Hellenistic manner.

Kaunos was once a seaport, but from around 200 BC the river began to silt up its harbour, and today the ruins lie about 8 km from the open sea. Attacks by Arab raiders and pirates from the seventh century, and later a malaria epidemic in the fifteenth, led to its final abandonment. Excavations, begun in 1966 under Professor Baki Öğün, have uncovered a theatre built into the hillside with room for about 5,000 spectators, Roman baths and a palaestra, the city walls and the remains of six temples. The surrounding river delta, with its maze of reed channels running down to İztuzu Beach, adds to the setting.

Getting there

Kaunos lies across the Dalyan River from the town of Dalyan in Muğla Province, Turkey; the ruins are a short boat crossing from the town. The nearest resort, Sarıgerme, is about 14 km away, and Dalaman International Airport (DLM) is about 20 km away.