Dalyan River

The Dalyan River is not really a river at all. It is a channel, narrow and reed-walled and slow, carrying the water of Lake Koycegiz down to the Mediterranean through the Ortaca district of Turkey's Mugla province, past the town of Dalyan and beneath the rock-cut tombs of the ancient city of Kaunos. The Turkish word dalyan means fishing weir, and the trade the name refers to is still visible in the nets and traps strung across the water. For visitors the channel is the main road: boats threading the reed beds are the standard way to reach the tombs, the ruins, the hot springs and the beach.

From Lake Koycegiz to the Sea

Lake Koycegiz covers about 5,200 hectares, which makes it one of the largest coastal lakes in Turkey, and drops to between 20 and 60 metres deep. Its water is a mixture: stream flow and snowmelt off the mountains, freshwater springs, warm sulphurous water rising along geological faults, and mildly brackish seawater pushed up the channel on a rising tide. That mix supports an unusual range of life, including two dwarf goby species found nowhere else in the world, described as recently as 2011 and named after the lake district and after Kaunos.

The marshes and hillsides around the lake carry stands of Oriental sweetgum, a tree that grows almost nowhere outside Mugla province, and on the southern shore the Sultaniye spa draws on a sulphurous hot spring still used as a bathing pool. The whole system of lake, channel, delta and beach is protected as the Koycegiz-Dalyan Special Environmental Protection Area, and it counts as an important bird area as well as a stronghold for terrapins, tortoises, dragonflies and damselflies.

Dalyan itself is a small place, a settlement of well under ten thousand people rather than a resort town, lying between Marmaris and Fethiye on the southwest coast. The river is best reached during a Gocek gulet cruise, with the yacht anchoring on the coast and guests transferring to a shallow-draught river boat for the run upstream through the reeds.

Kaunos and the Rock Tombs

The tombs cut into the cliff opposite the town are the reason most people come. Carved as temple facades with columns and pediments in the Lycian manner, they date from roughly the 4th century BC onward and belonged to the elite of Kaunos, the city on the far bank; six of them face the river directly, which is why the view from a boat is the one that gets photographed rather than the view from the site itself.

Kaunos was a Carian city on the frontier with Lycia. The ancient Calbys, today's Dalyan channel, was the border between the two regions. The oldest object recovered from the site, the neck of a Protogeometric amphora, points to occupation by the 9th century BC or earlier, and Herodotus mentions the Caunians when the Persian general Harpagus swept along this coast in 546 BC. Legend gave the city a founder in King Kaunos, son of the Carian king Miletus and the nymph Kyane.

It made its money at sea, exporting salt, salted fish, slaves, pine resin, black mastic and dried figs, and its harbour agora dates to the 4th century BC. Excavation has uncovered a theatre seating around 5,000, an acropolis on a crag 152 metres above the water, Roman baths and a palaestra, six temples of which two are Hellenistic and four Roman, and a Byzantine basilica of the 5th century AD. Systematic digging began in 1966 under Professor Baki Ogun and has continued under his successors ever since.

The city's decline was geological before it was political. Silt carried down from the interior began closing the delta from around 200 BC; the southern harbour dried out after the Hellenistic period, and the shoreline moved so far seaward that the ruins now stand roughly 8 kilometres inland. Malaria in the new marshes finished the job, and Kaunos was abandoned in the 15th century, which is the main reason so much of it survived unquarried.

Iztuzu Beach and the Campaign That Saved It

The channel ends at Iztuzu Beach, a sand bar some 4.5 kilometres long separating the freshwater delta from the open Mediterranean. It is one of the principal loggerhead nesting grounds in the Mediterranean, averaging around 300 nests a year. Between 1 May and 31 October the beach is closed to the public between 20:00 and 08:00 so that nesting females and emerging hatchlings are left undisturbed, and the restriction is enforced rather than advisory.

That the beach exists in this state at all is the result of a fight. In April 1987 construction began on an 1,800-bed resort hotel directly behind the sand. The campaign against it drew in conservationists including June Haimoff, David Bellamy, Lily Venizelos and Nergis Yazgan, and organisations from the IUCN to Greenpeace and the WWF; Prince Philip, then president of the WWF, asked the Turkish prime minister Turgut Ozal for a moratorium. The building was stopped, and in July 1988 the Koycegiz-Dalyan area was declared a Special Environmental Protection Area. Haimoff, who lived in a hut on the beach and became known locally as Kaptan June, was appointed MBE in 2011 for the work.

A sea turtle research and rehabilitation centre, DEKAMER, was established in 2008 and began operating on the beach the following year, treating injured animals and running the monitoring programme that produces the annual nest counts.

Making a Day of It

River boats remain the practical transport here. The maze of reeds is navigable only by shallow craft, and the standard circuit runs from the town landing past the tombs, across to the jetty below Kaunos, up toward the lake for the sulphur pools and mud at Sultaniye, and back down to Iztuzu at the river mouth. Done at a sensible pace it fills a day, and it is one of the few excursions on this coast where the geography, the ruins and the wildlife all make sense as a single story: a silted harbour, a lost city, a protected delta and a beach that was very nearly built over.