Xanthos

Xanthos was the largest city of ancient Lycia and, for long stretches of its history, its capital. The ruins stand on a hill above the Esen river — the Xanthos of antiquity — beside the village of Kinik, in the Kas district of Antalya province, about 45 km northwest of Kas town. Together with the sanctuary of Letoon, 4 km to the south, the site has been on the UNESCO World Heritage List since 1988.

A city that twice destroyed itself

The Lycians called the place Arnna; Xanthos is the Greek name. The acropolis goes back to the 8th century BC, and the city was successively under Persian, Greek and Roman control, each leaving something behind in its architecture and its inscriptions.

Around 540 BC the Median general Harpagus, campaigning for Cyrus of Persia, defeated a small Lycian force on the flat ground north of the city. Herodotus records what followed: the Xanthians shut their women, children and slaves inside the acropolis and burned it, then went out and fought until they were killed. The city was later repopulated.

In 333 BC the Lycian cities sent representatives to Xanthos to submit to Alexander the Great. Arrian describes a peaceful handover; Appian has the city taken by force — the sources disagree.

The pattern of 540 BC repeated itself in 42 BC. During the civil war that followed Caesar's murder, Brutus besieged Xanthos after the Lycian League refused to fund his army. According to Plutarch the inhabitants again set their own city alight; roughly 150 people survived. Most of what is standing today belongs to the Roman rebuilding that came afterwards, laid out on a grid.

What is left on the site

• The theatre, Roman work, sits below the Lycian acropolis with the agora beside it — the first thing you reach from the car park.
• The Nereid Monument, a temple-shaped tomb built around 390-380 BC for a Lycian dynast. Its sculpture was removed in the 1840s and the facade is now reconstructed in the British Museum. It is generally held to have influenced the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, built a few decades later at modern Bodrum.
• The Inscribed Pillar, or Xanthian Obelisk, a pillar tomb on the acropolis carrying one of the longest known Lycian texts. The inscription is trilingual — Lycian, Milyan and Greek — and is the single most important source for Milyan, an Anatolian language attested almost nowhere else. The dynast it commemorates was probably Kheriga.
• The Harpy Tomb, a pillar tomb of about 480 BC named after the winged female figures on its relief panels, more likely sirens carrying the dead than harpies. The originals are in the British Museum; casts stand in their place on the pillar.
• Rock-cut and free-standing Lycian sarcophagi are scattered across the slope, several of them still carrying their inscriptions.

Letoon

Letoon, 4 km south towards the coast, was the religious centre of the Lycian League and shares the UNESCO listing with Xanthos. Three temples stand side by side there, dedicated to Leto and to her children Apollo and Artemis, and a trilingual stele found on the site — Lycian, Greek and Aramaic — did much the same work for Lycian studies as the pillar at Xanthos. The lower part of the sanctuary is often under standing water, which is part of why it looks the way it does.

Getting there

The site is signposted from the D400 between Fethiye and Kas, just past Kinik, and takes an hour or two to walk. Patara — the harbour city of the league, with its 18 km beach — and Kalkan are both within half an hour by road, so the three are commonly done in one day. Xanthos has no coastline of its own: its harbour silted up centuries ago and the ruins now sit several kilometres inland, which makes it a morning ashore rather than an anchorage. Guests on a Kas gulet cruise usually reach it from Kalkan, the closest harbour to the site.