Antiphellos

Antiphellos was the Lycian port city that once stood where the modern town of Kaş sits today, on Turkey's southwestern coast. Known to the Lycians by its older name, Habesos, it began as the harbour serving the inland city of Phellus, but grew steadily until it eclipsed its parent settlement, eventually minting its own coins and holding a vote in the Lycian League. Pliny the Elder, writing in the 1st century AD, thought the area produced the softest sponges to be had anywhere, which is about as close as the ancient sources come to describing what the place actually traded.

From Harbour to City

Phellus lay in the mountains a short way inland, near the modern village of Çukurbağ, on a long, narrow hilltop where city walls, watchtowers and rock-cut tombs can still be traced. It is the older of the two settlements: Hecataeus recorded it around 500 BC, and in the following century members of the Xanthian royal family lived there, giving it real political weight until Perikle of Limyra took it in the 390s BC. From the Hellenistic period onwards the balance tipped decisively the other way, and Antiphellos — with a working harbour, a sheltered bay and a position on the coastal shipping route — outgrew the town it had been built to serve.

The city was not spared the region's geology. An earthquake in 141 AD damaged much of Lycia, Antiphellos included, and the wealthy benefactor Opramoas of Rhodiapolis is recorded as having sent funds to the city, money that may well have gone towards repairs. Centuries of later building absorbed a great deal of what survived. When Sir Francis Beaufort charted this coast in the 1820s and Charles Fellows visited in April 1840, Fellows counted more than a hundred tombs in and around the site; many of them have since disappeared beneath the streets and houses of modern Kaş.

The Theatre Above the Sea

The clearest evidence of the city's prosperity survives in stone. A Hellenistic theatre cut from local limestone on the southern slope of the acropolis still overlooks the water, built to seat around 4,000 spectators across roughly twenty-six rows, divided into three blocks by four flights of steps and with no horizontal walkway breaking them up. What makes it unusual is what it lacks: there is no permanent stage building, so nothing was ever allowed to block the view out over the Mediterranean. It is one of very few theatres in Anatolia deliberately oriented towards the sea rather than inland, and on a clear evening the Greek island of Kastellorizo — Meis in Turkish, about six kilometres offshore — sits squarely in the frame.

Tombs in the Middle of a Modern Town

On the northwestern edge of the acropolis stands the Doric tomb sometimes called the Akdam tomb, a square chamber cut from the bedrock in the 4th century BC. Inside, three carved couches line the walls, and above them runs a U-shaped frieze about 3.36 metres long showing twenty-six female figures holding hands, generally read as a line of dancing girls. Nothing else quite like it has been found in the region, and its pyramidal roof has not survived.

The other landmark sits in the middle of the modern town, a couple of hundred metres up from the harbour: the so-called King's Tomb, a classical Lycian sarcophagus raised on a burial chamber, with an ogival lid shaped like an upturned boat and a lion's head projecting from either side. Scholars date it to around 390–380 BC. Its inscription is cut in Lycian, a language that died out in antiquity and is still only partly understood; this particular text has never been satisfactorily translated, and it remains one of the more frustrating loose ends of Lycian epigraphy.

Antiphellos in Today's Kaş

Kaş kept the ancient name alive in a very literal way. Under Ottoman rule the town was called Andifli, a direct descendant of Antiphellos, and it remained a mixed harbour community until the Greek population left in the exchange of 1923; tourism only became the main business here in the early 1990s. The town itself now has around 9,000 residents and sits some 168 kilometres west of Antalya, with the ancient remains woven through it rather than fenced off from it.

Much of ancient Antiphellos now lies beneath streets and houses, but its surviving tombs and theatre remain within easy walking distance of the harbour, making it a popular stop for gulet charter guests exploring Kas before or after a day on the water. The theatre is open at all hours and free to enter, which is why so many visitors end up there at sunset, and sarcophagi turn up in the oddest places on the way — at the end of a lane, beside a shopfront, or standing alone in a small square.