Aperlai Bay

Aperlai Bay is the long inlet on the western side of the Sicak peninsula, in the Kekova area between Kas and Demre. At its northern end stand the ruins of Aperlai, a Lycian port whose walls run down to the waterline and keep going underwater. There is no road to it: you arrive by boat, by sea kayak, or on foot along the Lycian Way.

The Ancient City

Aperlai was founded between the late fourth and early third century BC and was inhabited for roughly a thousand years, until raiding along this coast made it untenable and the city was abandoned around the end of the seventh century AD. Greek sources give the name as Aperlai; Ptolemy wrote it Aperrae and Pliny the Elder Apyrae, and an inscription naming the citizens as Aperleitai settled the question.

Politically the city ran above its weight. Aperlai headed a sympolity - a shared civic arrangement - with Simena, Isinda and Apollonia, though the whole group carried a single vote in the Lycian League. The city wall, built in mixed rectangular and polygonal masonry and reinforced with towers, climbs from the shore towards the acropolis. Inside it are a church, a chapel, rock-cut cisterns and Roman sarcophagi; more sarcophagi lie scattered along the shoreline. There is no spring on the site, which is why the cisterns were cut - a detail that still governs life here.

The Purple Trade

Aperlai's wealth came from Tyrian purple, the dye taken from murex sea snails. The yield is minute - experiments put it at roughly 12,000 snails for 1.4 grams of dye - which is why the colour stayed a marker of rank for a thousand years. The evidence is still underfoot: crushed murex shells cover about 1,600 square metres of the site, an industrial waste heap left in place.

Anchoring and the Sunken Ruins

The inlet shelves gently at its head and deepens towards the entrance. The weakness is old and well documented: the bay gives limited protection to shipping in a blow, a problem for the ancient harbour and still true for modern crews, so it works as a daytime or settled-night stop rather than a bolt-hole. Aperlai is one of the anchorages you'll visit on a private gulet charter from Kekova, and most boats come in for the swim over the ruins before moving on to Ucagiz or Sicak Bay to sleep.

Earthquakes dropped part of the city below the waterline - the same tectonic movement that produced the better-known sunken city on Kekova island opposite. Foundations, wall lines and the odd sarcophagus sit under a few metres of water, close enough to the surface to read from a mask. Snorkelling over them is permitted; scuba diving and any disturbance of the seabed are not, because the whole bay is a protected archaeological area. Aqua shoes are worth having, as the submerged masonry is sharp and slippery.

Getting There

Aperlai lies about 9 km west of Ucagiz and some 7.5 km from Simena by water. Boats and sea kayaks come from Ucagiz and from Kas, roughly 15 km to the northwest. Walkers reach it on the Lycian Way between Ucagiz and Bogazcik. One guesthouse operates at the site, the Purple House, and it lives on rainwater collected in cisterns - the same solution the Lycians used.