About Kas

Kaş is a coastal district of Antalya Province on Turkey's Turquoise Coast, about 168 kilometres west of Antalya city. Long before it took its current name, the site was a Lycian settlement called Habesos, later known to Greeks and Romans as Antiphellos, the port serving the inland city of Phellos. Today the harbour town blends that ancient backdrop with a modern reputation as one of Turkey's leading diving and trekking bases, drawing visitors who split their days between rock-cut tombs and open water.

History

Antiphellos grew through the Hellenistic and Roman periods, eventually overtaking Phellos as the district's largest settlement, after starting out under Lycian and then Persian control from around the sixth century BC. Its Hellenistic theatre, cut into the hillside above the harbour, seated around 4,000 spectators and was restored in 2008; unusually for Anatolia, it was built without a permanent stone stage so as not to block the sea view. Just above the modern town, Lycian rock tombs still overlook the streets, among them the so-called Doric Tomb, a fourth-century-BC monolith carved with a relief of dancing girls, and a King's Tomb bearing an inscription in the little-understood Milyan language; when the British traveller Charles Fellows passed through in 1840, he counted over a hundred such tombs cut into the surrounding cliffs. An earthquake in 141 CE damaged much of the wider region, and the city later had its own bishop, Theodorus, who attended the Council of Chalcedon in 451 CE — evidence that it remained a functioning town well into the Byzantine period.

Like the rest of the coast, the settlement passed to Seljuk and then Ottoman rule after Byzantine authority weakened under Arab raids. It lost most of its Greek Orthodox population in the compulsory population exchange of 1923 that followed the Greco-Turkish War, and for decades afterward it remained a modest fishing town. That changed in the early 1990s, when tourism began to take off, with the first wave of visitors arriving mainly from the UK and Germany.

Geography & Nature

The district recorded 62,866 residents in the 2022 census, the tenth-highest total among Antalya's districts, though the town centre itself holds only around 9,000 people. Kaş sits directly across from the Greek island of Kastellorizo, visible some six kilometres offshore. Nearby, Kaputaş Beach occupies a narrow gorge between steep cliffs about 20 kilometres from Kaş and 7 kilometres from neighbouring Kalkan, reached by a long staircase down from the coast road. Further along, within the wider Kaş district, lies Patara, once capital of the ancient Lycian League and seat of its assembly hall, the Bouleuterion, built in the early first century BC to hold around 1,400 delegates and still standing near the shore today. Patara's beach is often called Turkey's longest, though its precise length is disputed — cited anywhere from roughly 12 to 18 kilometres depending on the source.

Boats also run from Kaş harbour to Kekova, a small island protected since 1990, where a second-century earthquake left part of an ancient settlement partly submerged along the shoreline. The crossing takes about two hours directly by sea, or can be shortened by driving the roughly 30 kilometres to Üçağız and continuing from there by boat.

Diving and the Lycian Way

Clear water and more than fifty charted dive sites have made Kaş one of Turkey's established diving centres, with wrecks, underwater canyons and walls drawing divers from across the country and beyond. On land, the town is also a waypoint on the Lycian Way, a roughly 760-kilometre waymarked trail running between the Fethiye and Antalya areas, devised by British expatriate Kate Clow and opened in 1999; it remains one of the best-known long-distance walking routes in the eastern Mediterranean.

That combination of sheltered water, diving and nearby ruins gives the town its pull for boat travellers today, which is why so many visitors explore Kas by private gulet charter, often using it as a base to reach Kekova and the coves further along the coast.