Simena Castle

The village of Kaleköy, on the sheltered water of the Kekova region between Kaş and Demre, is built on and around the ruins of ancient Simena. A line of crenellated fortress wall crowns the hill above the harbour, Lycian sarcophagi stand among the houses and gardens, and a good deal of the ancient town lies just below the surface of the sea. There is no road in: this is one of the few inhabited places on the Turkish coast that can still only be reached by boat or on foot, and that isolation is the main reason it has survived so intact.

A Small Lycian Port with a Share in the League

Grave inscriptions and coin finds show that a town existed here by the 4th century BC. Ancient geographers placed Simena sixty stadia from Aperlae, and the Stadiasmus Maris Magni, a Roman-era handbook of coastal distances, lists it under the name Somena. It was never large. Its neighbours were close enough to walk to: Teimiussa, on the site of today's Üçağız village, lies less than a kilometre to the west, while Andriake, the harbour that served Myra, is roughly nine kilometres away along the coast to the east.

What makes Simena interesting is not its size but its standing. Under the Lycian League, one of the ancient world's earliest federal systems, Simena did not hold a vote of its own. It belonged instead to a sympoliteia, a formal union of communities, headed by Aperlae and also taking in Apollonia and Isinda, and the four settlements shared a single collective vote in the league assembly. Small coastal towns were therefore not simply dependants of larger neighbours; through combination they were participants in a representative structure that later writers on federal government studied with genuine interest.

Roman rule left the town its most conspicuous public building. The remains of a bath complex dedicated to the emperor Titus, whose reign lasted only from AD 79 to 81, now lie partly in the water at the edge of the settlement. It was a modest provincial gesture of loyalty to a new emperor, and it has been preserved, in a sense, by the very subsidence that ruined it.

The Fortress and Its Rock-Cut Theatre

The castle that gives Kaleköy its name, kale being simply the Turkish word for castle, is medieval in its present form and is generally attributed to the Order of the Knights of St John, who governed Rhodes and fortified points along this coast until they were forced out in 1522. The walls were not raised from nothing. They sit on earlier Lycian fortification lines, and the enclosure preserves sections of the older acropolis defences beneath the later work.

Inside the walls is the feature most visitors remember. A small theatre, sometimes identified instead as a bouleuterion or council chamber, was cut directly into the bedrock, with seven rows of seats and room for only a few hundred people. It is thought to date from the Hellenistic period, which would make it one of the oldest surviving theatres in Lycia, and it is certainly the smallest. From its steps the view runs out across the harbour to Kekova Island, and it takes very little imagination to picture the entire adult population of the town seated in it at once.

Around the acropolis are rock-cut tombs in the classical Lycian style, evidence of occupation going back to the dynastic period. Outside the walls the necropolis holds a scatter of sarcophagi with the pointed, ogival lids characteristic of Lycian funerary architecture, several of them tilted where the ground has shifted under them.

A Coastline That Sank

The most photographed object in the village is a Lycian sarcophagus standing in shallow water at the harbour's edge, its lid clear of the surface and its base submerged. It is not a curiosity but evidence. Repeated seismic activity along this coast, most dramatically an earthquake in the 2nd century AD, combined with long-term sea-level change to drop this stretch of shoreline by several metres. Simena's ancient harbour is now underwater, and survey work has recorded ship shelters cut into the rock below the waterline.

The same subsidence overwhelmed the neighbouring town of Dolichiste on the shore of Kekova Island opposite, where staircases, quay lines, wall foundations and house plans are clearly visible through the water from a passing boat. The whole area was declared a specially protected zone in 1990, and swimming, snorkelling and diving over the sunken remains are prohibited in order to keep them undisturbed.

Visiting Simena Today

Boats cross from Üçağız or from Çayağzı near Demre, and the climb to the castle is short but steep, up stone steps that thread between gardens, pensions and waterfront restaurants. There are no cars and no paved roads, which is a large part of why the village still feels of a piece with the ruins it occupies. Because the approach is by sea in any case, many visitors combine a day of sightseeing with a private gulet charter along the Turkey coast, anchoring in the bay and going ashore late in the afternoon, once the day boats have left and the light on the fortress walls is at its best.