Ucagiz

Üçağız is a small village at the head of a sheltered inlet on Turkey's Lycian coast, in the Demre district of Antalya Province, and the usual landfall for anyone visiting the Kekova region by sea. Ancient sarcophagi stand among the houses and gardens, fishing boats and gulets lie against the quay, and the water beyond the village opens into a maze of channels and islets that has been protected by law since 1990. It is one of those places where the ancient and the modern settlement were never separated, only stacked on top of one another.

Teimiussa, the Ancient Harbour

In antiquity Üçağız was Teimiussa, also written Teimioussa or Timiussa, a modest Lycian port. It carried the alternative name Tristomon, meaning three mouths, which survives almost exactly in the modern Turkish Üçağız: both refer to the three channels through which boats can reach the open sea from the bay. The name is not attested by any ancient historian, and everything known about the settlement has been reconstructed from inscriptions and from what survives on the ground.

Those inscriptions include Lycian texts on tombs in the area which place the settlement in the 4th century BC at the latest. Teimiussa never appears to have been a city in its own right; it functioned as a harbour and was tied administratively to larger neighbours, the great Lycian centre of Myra to the west and Cyaneae in the hills inland. Like the other communities around the bay it formed part of the wider network of the Lycian League, the federation that governed this coast before Rome absorbed it. German archaeologists led by Martin Zimmermann carried out survey work at the site between 1999 and 2001, concentrating on the relationship between the harbour and the settlement behind it.

What Survives in the Village

What remains at Üçağız is largely funerary. East of the village, a short walk along the shore, a dense necropolis spreads over the rocks: a cluster of Lycian sarcophagi, many of them Roman in date, with heavy pointed lids and, in several cases, inscriptions still legible on the chests. Some sit in the open with the sea directly below them; others have been absorbed into the gardens and boundary walls of the modern village, which is what gives Üçağız its peculiar layered quality.

Of the settlement's built structures very little stands. A rock-cut doorway near the water and the base of an old tower are among the few identifiable remains, alongside cuttings worked into the rock along the shoreline. The small islets between Üçağız and its neighbour Kaleköy were quarried in antiquity, largely for sarcophagi, and submerged sections of road and quay can still be made out through the water on the passage between the two villages.

Kekova, Simena and the Sunken City

Üçağız is the land gateway to the wider Kekova region, an area of roughly 260 square kilometres containing four ancient settlements: Teimiussa itself, Simena, Aperlae and Dolichiste. The last of these lay on the island of Kekova, some 4.5 square kilometres of bare limestone that closes the bay off from the open Mediterranean. Dolichiste was wrecked by an earthquake in the 2nd century AD and its southern edge slid below the waterline; staircases, doorways, house walls and harbour works are still visible under a few metres of clear water, and this is the site that gave rise to the name Batık Şehir, the sunken city. The town was rebuilt and remained active through the Byzantine period before being abandoned in the face of Arab raids.

A short distance east of Üçağız is Simena, now the hamlet of Kaleköy, which has no road and is reached on foot or by boat. A castle crowns the hill above it, built as a Byzantine strongpoint and reworked in later centuries; inside its walls is a tiny theatre cut straight into the bedrock, with seven rows of seats and room for perhaps 300 spectators, which gives a fair indication of how small these communities were. Below the castle stand Roman baths carrying a dedication to the emperor Titus, and the slope to the north-east is covered with another field of sarcophagi and rock tombs, one of which stands half-submerged in the shallows and has become the most photographed object on this stretch of coast.

Visiting Today

The whole area was declared a Specially Protected Area on 18 January 1990 by the Turkish environment ministry. Swimming and diving directly over the sunken remains are prohibited, and tour boats pass slowly along marked corridors before stopping in neighbouring coves where swimming is allowed. The restrictions have kept building to a minimum: there are no hotels of any scale, almost no traffic, and the waterfront is still lined with small pensions and fish restaurants rather than resorts.

Üçağız is served only by a narrow road down from the main Demre to Kaş highway, and most visitors still arrive on the water. That is precisely why the village is worth a visit if you're chartering a gulet in Turkey: the harbour, the quay and the whole rhythm of the place are organised around boats coming in off the bay, much as they were when Teimiussa was a working Lycian port.