Kas Lion's Sarcophagus

The Lion's Sarcophagus, also known locally as the King's Tomb, stands at the top of Uzun Çarşı Sokak ("Long Bazaar Street"), a former Roman road that climbs from the harbour through the middle of Kaş. Carved in the 4th century BC, it is a rare surviving example of a Lycian rock-cut sarcophagus: a sunken lower burial chamber about 1.5 metres high, topped by a plain stone base and a pointed, boat-shaped lid decorated with two lion heads, which gives the tomb its name.

How the Tomb Is Built

Structurally the monument is a classical Lycian sarcophagus set on a hyposorion, the lower chamber that carried a second, usually earlier burial. The chest above it was cut to imitate timber-framed construction, with the beam ends of a wooden house reproduced in stone, and the ogival lid curves up to a ridge with the two lion-head protomes projecting from either side. That house-shaped form was not decorative whimsy but a Lycian convention: elite families were buried in tombs that echoed the buildings they had lived in, a practice that sets Lycian burials apart from the simpler graves used elsewhere in Anatolia. When the nineteenth-century surveyors Spratt and Forbes worked their way along this coast, they singled the tomb out from the hundreds of sarcophagi they recorded, both for its architecture and for the text carved on it.

The Inscription and a Man Named Pixre

That text runs to nine lines on the north face and is catalogued as TL 55. It is written not in ordinary Lycian but in Lycian B, also called Milyan, an older and more literary form of the language that survives in only two known monumental inscriptions: this one and the inscribed pillar at Xanthos. The Kaş text is laid out in stanzas and reads as verse rather than as a conventional epitaph, which makes it one of the more unusual grave inscriptions anywhere in Anatolia. It has never been fully deciphered, but its opening line names Pixre, also transliterated Pigre, understood to be the man who commissioned the tomb for his family; the relief in the gable of the lid shows a standing man before a seated woman, presumably the same couple. On stylistic grounds the Danish scholar Jan Zahle dated the monument to about 390–380 BC, which would place it among the earliest tombs at Antiphellos.

Antiphellos, the City Under Kaş

The town beneath the modern one was called Habesos in Lycian, a name usually translated as "the land opposite the rocks"; the Greek form Antiphellos first appears on a tomb inscription of the fourth century BC. Lycians had settled the site by the sixth century BC, and for a long time the harbour served the inland city of Phellos rather than itself. By the Hellenistic period the relationship had reversed: Antiphellos was independent, minting its own coins, and held a vote in the Lycian League. Its wealth came from the sea and the hills behind it, timber and above all sponges, which Pliny the Elder singled out as the softest to be had anywhere. In the Byzantine centuries the town was a bishopric under the metropolitan of Myra, and its bishop Theodorus attended the Council of Chalcedon in 451. It later became Andifli under Seljuk rule, and the modern town grew directly over the ancient one, which is exactly why a royal tomb now sits between shopfronts.

What Else Survives Nearby

A few minutes' walk uphill is the theatre, cut into the southern slope of the acropolis with about 26 rows of seating and no permanent stone stage building. Estimates of its capacity range from roughly three to four thousand, and it is the only ancient theatre in Anatolia whose seats look straight out over open water, towards the Greek island of Kastellorizo. Just beyond it, on the north-western edge of the acropolis, stands the Doric tomb, a square chamber cut whole from the bedrock with a doorway 1.9 metres high; inside are three carved couches and a U-shaped frieze some 3.36 metres long showing around two dozen female figures, generally read as dancers and dated by their clothing to the fourth century BC.

Standing in the middle of the modern town, surrounded by shops and cafés along the same street it has overlooked for more than two thousand years, the sarcophagus is one of the more accessible reminders that Kaş's history runs far deeper than its harbour, something worth pairing with time on the water, whether that means a day exploring the coves or chartering a gulet from Kas.