Kas Local Market

The weekly market in Kas is one of the more genuine local experiences on Turkey's Turquoise Coast, held every Friday in the streets just back from the harbour. Growers from the villages of the surrounding district bring in fruit, vegetables, herbs, eggs, home-made cheese, olives, honey and olive oil, and trading runs from around nine in the morning until late afternoon on a market ground a short walk north of the centre. It is popular enough to draw day-trippers arriving by boat from the small Greek island of Kastellorizo, some six kilometres offshore.

Market Day and the Country Behind the Town

What makes the Friday market worth timing a visit around is how little of it is aimed at visitors. Most of the stalls belong to smallholders from the villages of Kas district, which covers roughly 1,750 square kilometres of coastline, valley and mountain, so what appears on the trestles follows what the land is doing rather than what tourists expect to find.

The district has a Mediterranean climate of hot, dry summers and mild, wet winters, and growing conditions shift sharply with altitude. The lowlands produce oranges, lemons and bananas; higher up the slopes come almonds and honey; higher still the land gives way to pine forest. All of that ends up on the market ground on a Friday morning, alongside eggs, cheeses made in the villages and jars of local honey.

The market's cross-border clientele is a quirk of geography. Kastellorizo, the Greek islet visible from the Kas waterfront, recorded just 594 residents at the 2021 census and covers under twelve square kilometres, with a regular ferry link to Kas that thins to a single sailing a week over the winter. A century ago it was a busy trading station of around 9,000 people, exchanging Anatolian coal, timber and pine bark for Egyptian goods. The island only came under Greek sovereignty in 1948, after the Second World War, and found an unexpected second life as a tourist destination after the 1991 film Mediterraneo was shot there.

Uzun Carsi and the Old Town Shopping Streets

Away from market day, shopping in Kas concentrates on Uzun Carsi, the long bazaar: a sloping, pedestrianised lane that climbs away from the harbour through the oldest part of town. The street follows the line of a Roman-era road, and the houses along it keep the Ottoman-era layout and proportions of a town whose Greek population departed in the 1923 exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey. Bougainvillea spills over the facades in summer, which is why this handful of streets ends up in most photographs of the place.

The shops cover the usual coastal range, from carpets and kilims to silver and gold, leather goods, glassware, ceramics and cotton textiles, mixed in with cafes, small restaurants and ice-cream stalls. Because the lane is closed to traffic it functions as much as an evening promenade as a shopping street, and the harbour is only a few minutes away on foot at the bottom of the slope.

At the top of Uzun Carsi, in a small shaded square roughly 200 metres northeast of the harbour, stands the town's most photographed antiquity: a Lycian sarcophagus of the 4th century BC known locally as the King's Tomb, or the Lion Tomb, after the lion heads projecting from each side of its pointed-arch lid. Its inscription is written in the Milyan language and has never been deciphered. For anyone spending time on the water nearby, the market and these surrounding streets are worth a visit if you're chartering a gulet from Kas, especially if the timing lines up with a Friday call into the harbour.

Antiphellos, the Ancient City Beneath Kas

That sarcophagus is not an isolated relic. Modern Kas sits directly on top of the ancient city of Antiphellos, whose Lycian name was Habesos; Pliny the Elder recorded the pre-Hellenic form as Habessus. It began as the harbour of Phellos, an inland town up in the hills, and as Phellos declined Antiphellos overtook it to become the largest settlement in this stretch of Lycia. It minted its own coins and held one vote in the Lycian League, the federation that governed the region's cities.

Under Roman rule the city kept its identity on its coinage, which carried the legend of the Antiphellitans, and it was probably damaged by the earthquake that struck the region in 141-142. Its Hellenistic theatre survives above the town, cut so that the seating looks straight out to sea. It could hold around 4,000 spectators and is complete apart from its proscenium, with no diazoma dividing the lower rows from the upper ones. Rock tombs carved into the cliffs behind the town, and Lycian inscriptions dated to the 4th century BC, fill in the rest of the picture.

Western visitors began recording the site in the nineteenth century. The Irish naval officer Francis Beaufort surveyed this coast and described the inscriptions here as very antient; the English archaeologist Charles Fellows saw the ruins in April 1838 and, returning in 1840, counted more than a hundred tombs. The city was also a bishopric, its bishop Theodorus attending the Council of Chalcedon in 451, and it is still carried by the Catholic Church as a titular see.

What came after antiquity is recorded more thinly. The town suffered Arab incursions, was annexed to the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum under the name Andifli, and later passed under Ottoman rule, which is the layer of history most visible in the streets today.

Beyond the Stalls

Kas lies 168 kilometres west of Antalya, and the district recorded 62,866 residents in 2022, of whom only 9,084 lived in the town itself, making it the tenth most populous district in Antalya province. That gap between district and town explains a good deal about the place: the tourism that arrived in the early 1990s never overwhelmed it the way it did the bigger resorts along the same coast, and the harbour still doubles as a working waterfront.

Most visitors come for the water. The town is one of Turkey's main diving centres, with more than fifteen dive schools operating and around fifty dive sites within reach along the coast. On land, the Lycian Way passes through: a waymarked long-distance route of roughly 760 kilometres running from Hisaronu near Fethiye to Geyikbayiri outside Antalya, devised by the British writer Kate Clow and opened in 1999. Twenty kilometres west of town, Kaputas Beach sits at the mouth of a canyon and is reached by a flight of 170 steps down from the coast road; the gorge behind it, cut by water over millennia, runs roughly 200 metres inland and can be walked when the level is low enough.

There is no airport at Kas; arrivals come through Antalya or Dalaman and then follow the coast road, which is slow, winding and largely the point of the journey. Concerts are held in the ancient theatre in summer. For crews provisioning ashore, the Friday market is the obvious stop for fresh produce, while the small supermarkets and bakeries in the streets behind Uzun Carsi cover everything else; prices on the market ground are quoted by the kilo and most stalls deal only in cash. The town is compact enough that the market, the bazaar, the sarcophagus and the ruins can all be covered comfortably in a single morning ashore.