Letoon

Letoon lies in the village of Kumluova in Mugla province, about four kilometres from the ancient city of Xanthos and close to the lower course of the Xanthos river. It was the federal sanctuary of ancient Lycia, the sacred centre at which the Lycian League proclaimed its religious and political decisions, and it was dedicated to the goddess Leto together with her twin children, Apollo and Artemis. The site was in use from around the 8th century BC until the end of the Roman period, and was finally abandoned in the 7th century AD.

Leto and the Lycian Connection

Greek myth tied Leto specifically to this corner of Anatolia. In the version told by the Roman poet Ovid in the sixth book of the Metamorphoses, Leto arrived in Lycia exhausted and thirsty with her newborn twins; the local peasants refused her water and deliberately muddied the pool to spite her, and she turned them into frogs. A variant preserved by Antoninus Liberalis has her driven away from a spring by herdsmen, guided by wolves to the Xanthos river, and consecrating its water to Apollo. Archaeology suggests the sanctity of the place is older than the Greek stories that explain it: the central temple of Artemis was built around a large outcrop of bedrock deliberately left standing inside its cella, which excavators read as evidence of an earlier rock cult reaching back into the Archaic period.

Temples, Theatre and Church

Three temples stand side by side on the terrace at the heart of the sanctuary. The western and largest is attributed to Leto, the eastern one to Apollo, and the smaller central building to Artemis. They are generally dated to the late 5th century BC, in the time of the Xanthian dynast Arbinas, and they replaced earlier structures on the same ground. For the most part only foundations survive, although a substantial part of the Temple of Leto has been re-erected through work carried out between 2000 and 2007. In front of the temples a fountain house was raised over a sacred spring in the Hellenistic period and rebuilt on a larger scale under the Romans; the terracotta figurines recovered from it, ranging from Archaic to Hellenistic in date, are understood as offerings to the Nymphs. Long colonnaded stoas were added along the western and northern sides of the precinct in the 2nd century BC and enlarged in the 1st century AD.

The best-preserved building on the site is the theatre, which retains 36 rows of seating and dates to the 2nd century BC. After antiquity a Byzantine church was raised within the sanctuary using blocks quarried straight out of the temples of Apollo and Artemis. Much of Letoon now sits below the water table of the Xanthos river, so the lower courses of the ruins stand in water for most of the year; a finely carved limestone pedestal decorated with a bull's head and garlands, in the northwestern part of the site, emerges only in the driest weeks at the end of summer.

The Letoon Trilingual

The most consequential find at Letoon is the stele known as the Letoon Trilingual, unearthed in 1973 beneath the terrace wall west of the Temple of Apollo. The block stands 1.35 metres high and carries parallel texts in Lycian and Greek on its two broad faces, with a summary in Aramaic on one of the narrow sides. Dated to about 337 BC, it records the founding of a new cult authorised by the Carian satrap Pixodaros. Because the same decree appears in three languages, the stele has been one of the principal tools for deciphering Lycian, an Indo-European language that is still only partly understood. The original is displayed today in the Fethiye Museum.

Excavation, Recognition and Visiting

The ruins were first identified in 1841 by Richard Hoskyn while he was making his way to Xanthos, and systematic excavation has been under way since 1962, initially by a French team under Henri Metzger and later Jacques des Courtils, with Emmanuel Laroche working on the inscriptions; more recent seasons have been directed by Turkish archaeologists under the authority of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. In 1988 Letoon and Xanthos were inscribed together on the UNESCO World Heritage List, recognised for the way they document the fusion of Lycian tradition with Hellenic influence. The site is compact, quiet and rarely crowded, which makes it worth a visit if you're chartering a gulet from Fethiye and want to break up time on the water with some genuine ancient history.