Kaunos

Kaunos stands on a hillside above the Dalyan river, in the Koycegiz district of Mugla, facing the town of Dalyan across the water. It was a working sea port for most of its life. Today the ruins sit roughly 8 kilometres inland, because the river silted up the bay in front of them and left the harbour stranded behind Iztuzu Beach.

Kaunos and Byblis

The founding story belongs to Kaunos, son of the Carian king Miletus and the nymph Kyane. His twin sister Byblis fell in love with him and confessed it in a letter. He refused her and left with a group of followers, travelling until he settled on the hills above the river and founded the city that carries his name. Byblis, in Ovid's version of the story, went mad with grief searching for him and dissolved into a spring.

From Independent City to Caria and Lycia

The oldest object found at the site is the neck of a Protogeometric amphora from the 9th century BC or earlier, so the hill was occupied long before the city that survives above ground. Kaunos began as an independent state, later belonged to Caria and later still to Lycia. The Calbis, the river now called the Dalyan, formed the boundary between those two regions, and Kaunos was the centre of its own small district on the line between them until the early 4th century BC.

Its position mattered because merchant ships running between the eastern Mediterranean and the Aegean passed this way, and Kaunos had two harbours to receive them. The Persian general Harpagus took the city during the invasion of 546 BC. Kaunos took part in the Ionian Revolt of 499 to 494 BC, and after the Persians were pushed back it joined the Delian League. Its tribute started at one talent and was raised tenfold in 425 BC, which says something about how fast the place was growing.

The end came slowly and then quickly. Silting from around 200 BC onwards pushed the coastline away from the harbours, trade fell off, and people left. Turkish conquest of Caria and a malaria epidemic finished the city off in the 15th century AD. It was left empty, and its location was lost to scholars until the English archaeologist Hoskyn identified the site in 1842.

What Is Left to See

The city walls date from the reign of Mausolus in the 4th century BC and are noticeably oversized for a settlement of this population, which is one of the reasons archaeologists read Kaunos as a place of strategic rather than purely local importance.

The best known monuments are the six rock-cut tombs in the cliff above the river, carved between the 4th and 2nd centuries BC. Their facades copy the front of a Hellenistic temple: two Ionic columns, an architrave and a triangular pediment, cut straight into the rock face. They are visible from the river long before you reach the site, and the style is distinctive enough to be named after the city.

The theatre is cut into the slope at an angle of 27 degrees, measures 75 metres across and held around 5,000 people. It is Hellenistic in plan with Roman alterations. Below it stands a domed basilica of the 5th century AD, built partly from stone robbed out of earlier buildings on the site.

Kaunos and UNESCO

Kaunos is not a World Heritage Site, but it is on Turkey's UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List under reference 5906. The case made for it rests on the city walls, the rock tombs and the other standing remains, on the layers of Carian, Lycian, Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine occupation on one site, and on the role Kaunos played in the early history of archaeology in Anatolia.

Reaching Kaunos from the Sea

The old approach still works, in a modified form. Yachts cannot enter the river, so they anchor in Ekincik Bay, about 28 nautical miles west of the Gocek bays, and guests transfer to a local river boat for the run up the Dalyan channel through the reed beds to the tombs and the ruins. Doing it that way puts you on the water the city was built to serve, which is why Kaunos ends up on so many itineraries for anyone chartering a gulet from Gocek.