Myra Turkey

Long before Demre became a market town known for its greenhouses, it was Myra, one of the largest cities of the Lycian League and one of only three, alongside Xanthos and Patara, to hold three votes in the league's assembly. The city sat on the river Myros, today's Demre Çay, in a fertile alluvial plain between the Massikytos mountains and the sea: close enough to the coast to run its own harbour, far enough inland to be defensible. Its ruins now sit at the edge of a modern town in Antalya province, and a great deal of the ancient city is still buried under river silt.

Myra and the Lycian League

The Lycians are thought to have founded the city, though Myra only enters the clear historical record once the League was formed in 168 BC, after which it prospered as a major town of Roman-era southern Anatolia. There is no substantiated written reference to Myra before that date, even though the rock tombs above the site are considerably older, and by the third century BC the city had been thoroughly Hellenized. Strabo lists it among the largest towns of the alliance. Its resident population in the Roman period may have been only around 5,000, yet it functioned as a regional metropolis, and in 325 AD, when Lycia was made a province separate from Pamphylia, Myra became the provincial capital. It was sacked by Abbasid troops in 809, returned to Byzantine control, and was lost again to raiders during the reign of Alexios I Komnenos.

The Rock Tombs and the Roman Theatre

The clearest evidence of that wealth is carved into the cliffs above the site: two necropolises of Lycian rock tombs, cut to resemble timber house façades and, according to the 19th-century traveller Charles Fellows, still visibly painted red, yellow and blue when he saw them in 1840. The carving reproduces beams, joists and even the pegged joints of wooden buildings, which is why the tombs remain the single best surviving record of how ordinary Lycian houses were put together.

Below the tombs sits Myra's Roman theatre, destroyed by an earthquake in 141 AD and rebuilt in the decades that followed; it remains one of the better-preserved theatres on the Lycian coast. The seating bowl measures about 111 metres across and held an audience estimated at between 10,000 and 12,000, far more than the resident population, which says something about the city's regional pull. The lower cavea survives in twenty-seven rows divided into wedges and carried on a network of vaulted passages and stairways, and blocks scattered around the site still show theatrical masks and reliefs, among them a figure of the city's Fortune holding a rudder and a cornucopia. Turkey's Ministry of Culture and Tourism has approved a restoration project that will re-erect collapsed seating using the theatre's own fallen stones.

Saint Nicholas, Bishop of Myra

Myra also served as the seat of a local bishop, a role held around 325 AD by the man later venerated as St Nicholas, whose reputation for anonymous gift-giving eventually made him the model for Father Christmas. The church that carries his name in Demre is not the building he knew: the present structure was raised in the eighth century from earlier material and substantially enlarged in 1043 under the Byzantine emperor Constantine IX and the empress Zoe. His relics did not stay either. Sailors from Bari removed them in 1087, leaving behind a broken sarcophagus and a series of frescoes. The church has since been placed on Türkiye's UNESCO World Heritage tentative list and is among the most visited sites on this coast.

Excavation keeps adding to the story. In December 2024 a team led by Ebru Fatma Fındık uncovered a limestone sarcophagus roughly two metres long, buried about a metre and a half beneath the church's mosaic floor; radiocarbon dating is under way to establish whether it has any connection to the saint's original burial.

Andriake and Hadrian's Granary

Myra's port lay a few kilometres away at Andriake, at the river mouth. It was busy enough to appear in the Acts of the Apostles, where Paul and his fellow prisoners change ships there for a vessel bound for Italy. Its most substantial surviving building is a Roman granary put up under the emperor Hadrian, an inscription dating it to his third consulship in 119 AD, measuring roughly 56 by 32 metres. Restored between 2013 and 2016, it now houses the Museum of Lycian Civilizations, opened in June 2016 with close to 1,500 artefacts drawn from Patara, Xanthos, Tlos, Olympos and Myra itself. The remains of an ancient synagogue have also been identified at the site.

Visiting Myra Today

Systematic excavation of Myra and Andriake began in 2009, when ground-penetrating radar first traced the buried city, and it continues to turn up new finds, including a cache of Hellenistic terracotta figurines uncovered in 2021 and a thirteenth-century chapel in remarkable condition. Because the Myros river gradually buried the lower town under metres of alluvium, the excavation director has taken to calling Myra the Pompeii of Anatolia; what is visible today is only a fraction of what is there. The site is a popular stop for gulet charter guests exploring Turkey, usually paired with a short walk from the coast to see the tombs and theatre together, and most visitors add the church in Demre and the museum at Andriake to the same morning. Spring and autumn are the easiest times to walk it, since the plain is hot and largely shadeless in July and August.