Yesilkoy

Yeşilköy, better known to sailors as Firnaz Bay (Fırnaz Koyu, and locally also Muğar Kürü), sits about two nautical miles northwest of Kalkan on Turkey's Lycian coast, within the Kaş district of Antalya province. There is no direct road down to the water, so the bay is reached almost exclusively by boat, roughly four kilometres from Kalkan and around twenty-two from Kaş, and that isolation has kept it free of the beach clubs and restaurants found elsewhere along this stretch of coastline.

The anchorage

The anchorage itself is straightforward. Depths of four to six metres over a mixed sand-and-algae seabed give a reasonably secure hold, with the northwest corner generally considered the best spot to drop anchor, though the bay is large enough that boats rarely feel crowded even in peak season. Steep, pine-covered slopes rise on either side and provide shelter from most winds. The cove carries protected status and no facilities may be built here, so there is no water, no fuel, no shop and no restaurant. Anything you need comes aboard with you.

Clear water and the clay banks

Firnaz is known among Turkish crews for two things: the clarity of its water and the natural clay along its edges. Visitors regularly coat themselves in the grey mud, let it bake dry in the sun and then swim it off, a ritual repeated at several coves on this coast. Whether it does anything for the skin belongs to folklore rather than medicine, but the swimming is genuinely good. The bay shelves gently, the water stays calm behind the headlands, and visibility is high enough that the seabed is easy to read from the surface.

The Patara aqueduct above the bay

The hills behind Firnaz carry the line of one of the most remarkable pieces of Roman engineering in Lycia. A 22.5-kilometre aqueduct once brought spring water down from the mountains to Patara, built under the emperor Claudius and running from about 51/52 AD. Most of it flowed by gravity, but at one point the water had to cross a valley some twenty metres deep, and Roman engineers solved that with an inverted siphon roughly 200 metres long, known today as Delikkemer: a line of hollowed limestone blocks slotted together on top of a polygonal wall, carrying pressurised water across the gap. An earthquake in 68 AD destroyed the original siphon, and inscriptions cut into blocks reused in the rebuilt wall record its restoration under Vespasian, noting pointedly that the work was achieved without additional taxes on the local population.

Patara and the Lycian Way

The city all that water was for lies a short way down the coast. Patara was the capital of the Lycian League, and its council chamber, a hybrid of debating hall and small theatre with room for around 1,400 people, is among the best preserved buildings of its kind in Anatolia. Patara was also the birthplace of Saint Nicholas, and its beach, one of the longest in Turkey, is a protected nesting ground for loggerhead turtles. Firnaz sits on the Lycian Way, the 760-kilometre waymarked path from Fethiye to Antalya that Kate Clow researched and marked out in 1999 as Turkey's first long-distance trail, so walkers and sailors cross paths here through the season. The clear, sheltered water and the absence of any real infrastructure explain why many gulet cruises from Kas call in here, usually as a swimming stop on routes that also take in Kalkan and Patara.