St Nicholas Island

Gemiler Island, better known to visiting crews as St Nicholas Island, is a low strip of rock about one kilometre long lying just off the coast near Oludeniz, in the Fethiye district of Turkey's Mugla province. From the water it looks like nothing much: scrub, pines and pale stone. Get closer and the whole hillside turns out to be built on, with church walls, cisterns, tombs and staircases climbing the slope, the remains of a Byzantine town abandoned more than thirteen centuries ago.

A Byzantine Town on a One-Kilometre Island

Five main churches survive, along with around forty other ecclesiastical buildings and more than fifty Christian tombs. The dating is usually given as spanning the Byzantine centuries between the fifth and the eleventh; archaeological survey assigns the five principal churches to between the fourth and sixth centuries AD, with the island's most intense religious activity concentrated in the fifth to seventh, when it served as a bishopric and a stop for pilgrims working their way along the Lycian coast. The grandest of the churches, conventionally numbered Church No. 3, sits at the island's highest point on a basilica plan and is cut in part directly from the rock.

The most unusual survival is a covered processional way running some 350 metres along the hillside and linking the churches under a roof, a piece of architecture with few parallels in the Byzantine world and clear evidence that large numbers of people were expected to move between the buildings in formal procession. Surveys and excavations run from the mid-1990s by Osaka University under Shigebumi Tsuji, working with the Fethiye Museum, identified at least eleven churches across the wider Oludeniz area and produced the first detailed published record of the site in 1995.

Saint Nicholas and the Name

The island's Turkish name, Gemile, is thought to come from the Greek word for camel, kamila, after the humped profile of the ridge; medieval seafarers knew it instead as St Nicholas Island. The tradition behind that name holds that Saint Nicholas, the fourth-century bishop of nearby Myra and the historical figure behind the Santa Claus legend, was buried in the rock-cut church at the summit after his death, and that his relics stayed on the island until the 650s, when the threat of an Arab fleet forced their removal inland to Myra, some 40 kilometres east along the coast.

Those raids did more than move a set of relics. Repeated Arab attacks in the seventh century emptied the island altogether, and it has never been permanently resettled since. That accident of history is why the remains are still so legible: nothing was built over them and nothing replaced them, so what you walk through is essentially a Byzantine provincial town left where it stood.

Visiting by Boat

The crescent-shaped bay on the sheltered side is a calm, clear anchorage with good swimming straight off the stern, and the shoreline supports pines, wild goats and lizards among the fallen masonry. As one of the anchorages you'll visit on a private gulet charter from Fethiye, Gemiler pairs a swim stop with a walk among ruins that few other anchorages on this coast can match. Go early or late in the day if you plan to climb, since there is almost no shade on the path to the summit church, and allow an hour to get up and back at a reasonable pace. The island can be visited year-round, though the summer months bring the heaviest mix of day boats and overnight gulets into the bay.