Paspatur Bazaar

Paspatur, Fethiye's old town, sits just back from the harbour at the heart of a settlement whose layers run from Lycian and Hellenistic times through Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman rule. Hittite records of around 1700 BC appear to refer to the place as Kuwalapašša; the Lycians knew it as Telebehi, and by the Hellenistic period it had become Telmessos, a city known across the ancient world for its school of diviners. Under the Ottomans the town was called Makri, or Meğri, and it took its present name only in 1934, in honour of Fethi Bey, an early Ottoman military pilot killed attempting a flight from Istanbul to Cairo.

How the Old Town Survived

Its Greek-speaking residents left in the population exchange of the 1920s, agreed under the Treaty of Lausanne, after which Turkish families moved into the vacated shops and houses; the emptied Greek village of Kayaköy, a short drive inland, is the best-known reminder of that upheaval. The district has stayed the commercial centre of Fethiye ever since, drawing both locals and visitors each evening.

The bigger break came three decades later. On the evening of 24 April 1957 a magnitude 7.1 earthquake struck off the coast between Rhodes and Fethiye, followed the next morning by a stronger shock of magnitude 7.3. Around 90 per cent of the town's buildings were damaged, some 1,500 structures were destroyed outright, and part of the quay slid into the sea. Almost all of central Fethiye was rebuilt afterwards, which is exactly why Paspatur matters: it is one of the few pockets where the older streetscape survived. Its oldest standing building is a mosque dating to 1791, and an Ottoman bathhouse from 1891 still stands nearby and still works as a hamam.

Streets, Shops and the Fish Market

Narrow, covered lanes wind between shops selling leather goods, textiles, kilims and carpets, jewellery, spices and handmade ceramics, and the same streets are lined with small cafes and restaurants that stay busy well into the evening. Stretches of the bazaar are roofed with awnings and strings of open umbrellas, which keeps the alleys shaded through the worst of the afternoon heat. Prices are negotiable in most of the smaller shops, and the mix leans towards workshops and family businesses rather than chain retail.

The adjoining fish market is the district's best-known ritual. Stallholders sell the morning's catch by weight around a central covered square, and the restaurants ringing it will cook whatever you have just bought — grilled, fried or baked — and serve it with mezes for a fixed charge per head. The arrangement was introduced deliberately by the municipality to turn a plain produce market into a place to eat, and it has become one of the things visitors most reliably remember about Fethiye. Scattered through the surrounding streets are Lycian sarcophagi left standing where they were found, with the modern town simply built around them.

Ancient Telmessos on the Doorstep

Paspatur is wrapped around genuine antiquity. The Telmessos theatre stands immediately by the old town's entrance, a Roman structure of the Augustan period, roughly 27 BC to AD 14, possibly built over an earlier Hellenistic phase. Its seating bowl measures around 78 metres across and is estimated to have held between 5,000 and 8,000 spectators; in the third and fourth centuries the orchestra was walled off to create an arena for gladiatorial contests. The theatre lay buried until the Fethiye Museum excavated it between 1992 and 1995, and it was consolidated again during restoration work from 2013.

A few streets inland, the Fethiye Museum gathers what has come out of the ground: Lycian pottery, jewellery, small statuary and votive stones from Telmessos, Tlos and Kaunos, plus a garden of sarcophagi and Roman tombstones. Its single most important object is the trilingual stele from Letoon, inscribed in Lycian, Greek and Aramaic in 338 BC and unearthed in 1973 — the find that finally gave scholars a way into the Lycian language.

Above the town, cut into the cliff face and floodlit after dark, are the Lycian rock tombs, the grandest of which is the Tomb of Amyntas, carved around 350 BC with a temple front of Ionic columns and a Greek inscription naming Amyntas, son of Hermagios. Higher still sits Fethiye Castle, most of it raised by the Knights of St John in the 15th century on top of far older Lycian masonry, with a view over the whole gulf. Close to the harbour and easy to combine with a walk up to the tombs, Paspatur is a popular stop for gulet charter guests exploring Fethiye before or after time on the water.