Telmessos Ancient City

Long before it was called Fethiye, the harbour town on this stretch of Turkey's coast was known as Telmessos, the largest city of ancient Lycia and the one closest to the Carian border. It kept that name, in one form or another, for well over a thousand years. Its ruins are not fenced off on a hillside somewhere outside town - they are the town. Tombs sit in the cliff above the shopping streets, sarcophagi stand at road junctions, and a Hellenistic theatre opens onto the modern quay.

A City Older Than Its Greek Name

The written record here begins in the Bronze Age. The Annals of Hattusili III, from the 13th century BC, mention a place called Kuwalapassa as part of the Lukka lands, the Hittite name for the region the Greeks later called Lycia, and another Hittite document records it sending aid alongside the city of Dalawa. The local Lycian name was Telebehi; Telmessos is the Greek rendering of it, and the settlement was already ancient when Greek speakers arrived on this coast.

What made Telmessos famous in the archaic and classical world was not its harbour but its diviners. The city ran what ancient authors describe as a school of seers, and its reputation travelled far beyond Lycia: the Lydian king Croesus is said to have consulted Telmessian interpreters before going to war against Cyrus of Persia. The best-known product of that tradition was Aristander of Telmessos, born around 380 BC, who first served Philip II of Macedon - he is credited with reading the dream that announced Olympias' pregnancy in 357 BC - and then became Alexander the Great's personal seer, interpreting sacrifices, omens and dreams from the beginning of the campaign to its end, including during the long siege of Tyre.

Persians, Alexander and the Hellenistic Kings

Telmessos fell to the Persian general Harpagos in 547 BC and passed into the Achaemenid Empire along with the rest of the Anatolian coast. By the fifth century BC it appears as a member of the Delian League, the Athenian-led alliance, before returning to Persian control. Alexander the Great took the city in 334 BC, arriving here after the siege of Halicarnassus during his march along the southern coast.

One of the better stories attached to Telmessos belongs to roughly this period. The Greek writer Polyaenus records that Nearchus the Cretan, later Alexander's admiral, took the fort at Telmessos from a commander named Antipatrides without a fight. He asked permission to land some captive women musicians and slaves in fetters, and Antipatrides, an old acquaintance, agreed. Small swords had been hidden inside the flutes and shields inside the baggage baskets; once the party was inside the fort, the attendants took up the weapons and seized it.

For nearly a century afterwards the city was ruled by a dynasty of Ptolemaic client kings. Lysimachus held Telmessos from February 240 BC until his death in 206 BC, and his son Ptolemy ruled from 206 BC until at least 181 BC. When the Treaty of Apamea redrew Asia Minor in 188 BC, after Rome's defeat of Antiochus III, most of Lycia and Caria was handed to Rhodes while Telmessos went to Eumenes II of Pergamon, with the ruling family's position expressly safeguarded in the treaty text. The Attalid kingdom was later willed to Rome, and Lycia's cities, Telmessos among them, spent the imperial centuries inside the Roman world.

Anastasiopolis, Makri, Fethiye

The city's later name changes track the fortunes of the whole coast. In the eighth century AD it appears as Anastasiopolis, apparently in honour of the emperor Anastasios II. Arab raids and the general insecurity of the middle Byzantine period reduced it considerably, and by 879 it is being recorded as Makri, a name taken from the long island lying across the entrance to its harbour. Turkish forces took the region at the end of the twelfth or the start of the thirteenth century, and Makri it remained throughout Ottoman rule.

The final change came in the twentieth century. Under the 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey, the Greek-speaking inhabitants of Makri left for Greece, where they founded Nea Makri, New Makri, near Athens; Turkish families arriving from Greece took their place. In 1934 the town was renamed Fethiye after Fethi Bey, one of the first pilots of the Ottoman air service, killed in a crash on 27 February 1914.

Almost none of the old town survived what came next. The earthquake of 24-25 April 1957 killed 67 people and damaged or destroyed some 3,200 buildings, around 90 per cent of everything standing in Fethiye at the time. Further quakes followed in 1969 and 2012, both above magnitude six. What you see at street level today is essentially post-1957, which is why the ancient monuments, cut into rock or built of massive stone, are now the oldest things in sight, and why the Greek and Ottoman town that stood here within living memory has almost entirely vanished.

What Survives Above the Harbour

The rock-cut tombs in the cliff behind the town are the signature of Telmessos. The grandest is the Tomb of Amyntas, carved around 350 BC as the facade of an Ionic temple, two columns set between projecting antae, with an unusually spacious chamber cut behind it. A Greek inscription on the tomb reads Amyntou tou Ermagiou, meaning Amyntas, son of Hermagios. The tombs beside it are plainer and far more weathered, some reduced to little more than holes in the rock face. Lower down, along Kaya Caddesi on the way up to them and beside the town hall, Lycian sarcophagi with their distinctive keel-shaped lids stand where they have always stood, now surrounded by traffic and parked cars rather than by an ancient necropolis.

The theatre sits directly by the quay. Founded in the Hellenistic period and rebuilt on a larger scale under Rome, it lay buried for centuries until excavation by archaeologists from the Fethiye Museum from 1993 uncovered the seating; twenty-eight rows have been exposed, and published estimates of the original capacity vary widely, between roughly five and eight thousand spectators. On the hill above stand the ruins of Fethiye Castle, built largely in the fifteenth century by the Knights of St John, who held Rhodes from 1310 to 1530, on much older foundations that probably mark the acropolis of the ancient city.

The Fethiye Museum, opened to the public in 1987, holds the movable half of the story. It is a small building with one archaeological and one ethnographic hall, plus an open courtyard where large stone blocks, sarcophagi and the Izraza Monument are displayed, and its most important object by some distance is the trilingual stele found at Letoon in 1973. Inscribed around 338 BC with 41 lines of Lycian, 35 of Greek and 27 of Aramaic, it remains one of the key documents in the study of the Lycian language, which is otherwise known largely from tomb inscriptions of the kind carved into the cliff above this harbour.

What made the site valuable in the first place has not changed at all. Telmessos existed because of a deep, well-sheltered gulf with an island lying across its mouth, and that gulf is still the reason people come, exploring the coast by boat from Fethiye much as sailors have done here for more than two thousand years.