Besmi Island

Besmi is a small uninhabited island off Kas, on the Mediterranean coast of Antalya province, about thirty minutes by boat from the town harbour. It sits close to the Greek island of Kastellorizo — Meis in Turkish — and near enough to the maritime border that skippers pay attention to where they are. Nothing has been built on it, which is the whole point of going.

The island itself

There are no facilities of any kind on Besmi: no jetty, no water, no shade beyond what the rock and scrub provide. Anything you need for the day comes with you on the boat. Because there is no lighting anywhere on the island, and none on the shore behind it, the sky at night is genuinely dark, which is why crews that stay late stop and look up.

Everyone arrives and leaves by sea — day boats out of Kas, dive boats, and the gulets working this stretch of coast. Besmi is one of the anchorages you'll visit on a private gulet charter from Kas, normally as a swimming and snorkelling stop rather than an overnight one: the island is open on all sides, and the wind here changes faster than it does in the sheltered bays further west.

Summers are reliably sunny and July and August bring the most boats. Outside those weeks you can have the anchorage largely to yourself.

Diving

Besmi is one of the better-known dive sites out of Kas. The reef starts about a metre below the surface and drops away to well over 100 metres, so the same island suits very different dives. The northeastern side stays shallow enough for beginners and try-dives; the southwestern side falls off steadily and is used for deeper work. Diving depends entirely on the weather — the site is exposed, and centres cancel it when the sea gets up.

The current normally runs from the southeast and sweeps along the flanks of the island, strong enough to pull a diver off the wall if it is ignored. In exchange, it brings fish: schools of grouper, passing barracuda, leerfish and trumpetfish. The seagrass beds on the shallower shelves are where the loggerhead and green turtles feed, and they are unbothered enough by divers to swim alongside them. Visibility is usually good, but a torch is worth carrying — colour disappears quickly once you drop below the reef top.

The wreck and the amphorae

The seabed around Besmi holds worked stone, old anchors and amphorae, scattered along what was a working trade route rather than a single tidy site. The main wreck lies between roughly 30 and 60 metres, with the best-preserved amphorae standing intact at around 40 metres. That is technical depth, outside recreational limits, and it is dived accordingly.

In May 2025 the underwater documentary maker Tahsin Ceylan filmed the wreck with dive instructor Levent Aydogmus and his team. The cargo — amphorae together with pithoi, the large jars used for carrying pulses — dates the ship to the 9th or 10th century AD, and it is thought to have left the coast of Gaza loaded with olives and olive oil before being caught by a storm off Kas.

Around Besmi

The same day out usually takes in more than one stop:

• Kekova, east of Kas, where the walls, staircases and foundations of a Lycian settlement run down into the water along the island's northern shore — the standard highlight of a blue cruise on this coast.
• Kaputas, the beach in a narrow gorge on the road between Kas and Kalkan, reached by a long stairway from the clifftop and served in season.
• Limanagzi, a set of small bays just east of Kas town with beach clubs on the water and no road access.