Kayaköy

Across a green upland valley a few kilometres south of Fethiye, a whole town of roofless stone houses covers the slopes of a hill. This is the old Greek settlement of Levissi, today called Kayaköy, and it is one of the most affecting ruins on the Turkish coast: around five hundred houses, stepped lanes, chapels and a seventeenth-century fountain, all standing where they were left and slowly weathering into the hillside.

The site has a long pedigree. In antiquity there was a Lycian town here called Karmylessos, and the name survived in shortened form as Lebessos and then Levissi. By the early twentieth century the town was a prosperous Greek Orthodox community of roughly 6,500 people, with a market, a school and more than twenty churches and chapels. Its end came in stages: deportations of families inland from 1916, further exile in the last years of the First World War, and finally the Greek–Turkish population exchange agreed at Lausanne in 1923, which sent the remaining Orthodox inhabitants to Greece. The Fethiye earthquake of 1957 damaged much of what remained, and the living village of Kayaköy today lies on the valley floor below the ruins.

What makes the walk through the ruins memorable is how legible the town still is. The houses step up the slope one above another, and their empty window frames line up across the slope like a stage set. The two large churches frame the visit: the Lower Church near the valley, with an ossuary in its churchyard, and the Upper Church of the Taxiarchis, the biggest in the town, higher up, a nineteenth-century building whose vaulted interior still shows traces of painted decoration. Scattered between them are dozens of tiny chapels. The town inspired the fictional Eskibahçe of Louis de Bernières' novel Birds Without Wings, and appears in the film The Water Diviner. Late afternoon, when the low sun rakes across the facades, is the time to see it.

Getting there

Kayaköy is about 8 km from Fethiye, and Dalaman International Airport (DLM) is about 30 km away as the crow flies, a longer drive by road via Fethiye. Dolmuş minibuses run from Fethiye to Kayaköy in around twenty to twenty-five minutes. A marked footpath leaves from the area of the Upper Church and descends to Ölüdeniz in roughly an hour and a half, so many visitors walk one way and return by bus.