Arymaxa

Arymaxa is a small ancient site on the Kapıdağ Peninsula in Muğla Province, on Turkey's southwestern coast, inside the region that ancient geographers called the Rhodian Peraea, the mainland territory once controlled by the island city-state of Rhodes. It is recorded as one of two dependent communities, or demoi, of the larger neighbouring city of Lydae, and the remains scattered across the hillsides here belong mostly to the Roman and Byzantine centuries. The peninsula runs southeast from below Dalaman and separates the Gulf of Fethiye from the open Mediterranean, which is the main reason almost everyone who sees Arymaxa arrives by water.

A Deme of Lydae

Lydae sat in a stretch of coast that ancient writers could not quite agree about. Ptolemy listed it under Lycia, calling it Chydae, while the coastal handbook known as the Stadiasmus Maris Magni recorded it as Klydai and placed it in Caria. Under the Roman Empire the city absorbed two previously separate communities, Arymaxa and Kreneis, through the arrangement Greek cities called sympoliteia, a formal merger in which the smaller partner kept a civic identity as a deme while sharing the institutions of the larger. Inscriptions found on the peninsula record that fusion, and are essentially the reason Arymaxa is known at all.

This was not a backwater. The family of Gaius Iulius Heliodoros, attested in local inscriptions, produced Lycian federal priests, an archiphylax and eventually a Roman senator, which says a good deal about the wealth once circulating in a place that today has no road leading to it.

What Survives

The site was identified for modern scholarship by the British travellers Theodore and Mabel Bent in March 1888, during a season of work along the coast of Asia Minor supported by the Hellenic Society, and Bent published the inscriptions he copied here in the same year. What struck him then still dominates the site now: monumental Roman tombs, several of them inscribed, standing among the foundations of a city that has never been systematically excavated.

Walkers who reach the plateau find rock-cut tombs and mausoleums, cisterns, column fragments, the outline of an agora, a bath building, a later church, and a theatre still buried under its own hillside. At sea level, walling associated with Arymaxa can be picked out in the shallows, while the neighbouring cove of Hamam Bay holds the partly submerged remains of a Byzantine bathhouse, widely marketed as Cleopatra's Bath on no evidence whatsoever, along with the ruins of a Byzantine monastery ashore.

Reaching the Ruins

There is still no road onto this part of the Kapıdağ Peninsula, so the ruins are reached either by boat or on foot. The usual approach starts from Manastır Bay, where an old partly paved path climbs between the trees; after about fifteen minutes there are views back over the bay and across to Gökgemile cove on the western side of the isthmus, and after roughly an hour the path levels out onto the plateau where the ancient remains begin to appear. Three to four hours is a realistic allowance for the round trip. A marked but rough Lycian Way section also approaches from Sarsala or Kapukargın in an hour to an hour and a half.

Ruins like these are part of what draws sailing visitors beyond the beaches of this coastline, and many gulet cruises from Gocek call in here as part of longer, history-focused itineraries along Turkey's southwestern shore, usually pairing the climb up towards Lydae with a swim over the sunken bathhouse in Hamam Bay.