Aperlai

The ruins of Aperlai lie on a quiet bay of the Lycian coast, on the Sıçak Peninsula facing Kekova, roughly midway between Kas and Demre and about seven and a half kilometres from ancient Simena. Inscriptions place its foundation at the end of the 4th century BC, and the city was then occupied for close to a thousand years, through the Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine periods, before being abandoned around the middle of the seventh century AD in the face of raiding along the coast. It was never large — the researchers who surveyed it estimate no more than a thousand inhabitants at its height — but for such a small place it was remarkably rich, and the reason is a sea snail.

A City Built on Purple

Aperlai's wealth came from Murex trunculus, the marine mollusc from which the ancient world extracted Tyrian purple. The process was ruinously wasteful, consuming thousands of shells for a few grams of dye, and it left an unmistakable signature on the landscape: west of the site, across a ravine still spanned by a Roman-period bridge, lies an enormous midden of crushed murex shells, and survey work has traced shell dumps covering more than 1,600 square metres near the shore — the industrial waste of centuries of production. In the harbour itself, divers recorded three large rectangular tanks, now submerged, almost certainly used to process and hold the dye before it was shipped out and sold on.

Purple cloth was a luxury restricted in practice to the wealthiest households and later to the imperial court, so a town with a reliable supply of the raw material and the know-how to render it carried leverage far beyond its size. The archaeological survey also logged around 32 cisterns, two bath complexes and more than a hundred agricultural terraces cut into the hillside — the infrastructure of a community that had to feed and water itself on a peninsula with no river.

Coins, Alliances and the Lycian League

Aperlai was no bystander in regional politics. It headed a sympoliteia, a formal shared-citizenship alliance, together with the neighbouring cities of Simena, Isinda and Apollonia, and that bloc carried a single vote in the Lycian League. Aperlai minted coins in its own name, and issues bearing the Lycian form of the name are known from the earlier dynastic period, although their attribution is still debated by numismatists. Inscriptions connected with the alliance sometimes describe individuals as Aperlite even when they came from one of the partner towns, which says a good deal about how the sympoliteia worked in practice.

An earthquake in AD 141, the same regional event associated with the drowning of the Kekova shoreline, damaged the city, and records credit Opramoas of Rhodiapolis, the great Lycian benefactor of the period, with funding repairs across the region. Aperlai remained significant enough in late antiquity to serve as a bishopric, and the number of churches identified on the site, five in total, is well out of proportion to its population. One explanation offered by the excavators is its position: this was among the last sheltered landfalls for ships heading east towards the Holy Land, and the shrine of Saint Nicholas at Myra lay only about twenty-five kilometres away, so pilgrim traffic may have been a real part of local life.

What Lies Under the Water

Aperlai is best known today for what has sunk. Long-term subsidence along this coast, driven by seismic movement, has carried a substantial part of the ancient waterfront below sea level, so quay walls, building foundations and the dye tanks are now visible only from a boat or while snorkelling. The clearest example is a stone church roughly 20 metres by 10, apparently built after AD 330 on what was then the shoreline, which now sits around two metres beneath the surface; it was identified in June 1998. Two of the site's five churches are underwater.

On land, the Hellenistic fortification circuit is still traceable, with towers and gates, and the necropolis outside the walls holds a scatter of Lycian-style sarcophagi of Hellenistic and Roman date, their distinctive keel-shaped lids largely intact. Systematic study of the site began in 1996, when a joint team from the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of Maryland, led by Robert Hohlfelder and R. Lindley Vann, started surveying both the standing ruins and the submerged harbour. Much of the peninsula has still never been excavated.

Reaching Aperlai Today

There is no road. Aperlai can be reached on foot or by sea, and it sits beside a section of the waymarked Lycian Way, the long-distance trail researched and marked out from 1999 by British-Turkish historian Kate Clow, which threads along this coast between Kas and Demre; walkers usually come in from the Sıçak road head. The wider area falls inside the Kekova Specially Protected Area, some 260 square kilometres of coast and islands managed for conservation, where swimming and diving are prohibited over the best-known sunken remains at Kekova itself.

Because the ruins sit within that archipelago rather than in a single resort town, many gulet cruises from Kas call in here as part of a longer day on the water, usually combined with Üçağız, the castle village of Kaleköy and the sunken city shoreline. Anchoring in the bay puts you directly over the ancient harbour, and the walk up through the walls takes only minutes. Bring shoes you do not mind getting wet, because the most interesting part of Aperlai is the part you have to swim to.