Mount Chimaera

Above the village of Çıralı, on the hillside overlooking Turkey's Antalya coast, dozens of small flames burn continuously from cracks in the bare rock at a site known as Yanartaş, or Mount Chimaera. The fire is fed by methane and other gases escaping from deep underground rather than by surface vegetation, which is why the flames have burned, largely without interruption, for well over two thousand years. Ancient writers including Pliny the Elder and Strabo described the phenomenon, and Seneca noted that the ground around the flames stayed green and grassy despite the fire. Few natural sites in the Mediterranean have been written about so continuously, and fewer still look quite so improbable when you finally stand in front of them.

Where the Fires Burn

Yanartaş — the name means burning rock in Turkish — sits on the lower slopes of a mountain in Antalya Province, roughly 80 kilometres southwest of the city of Antalya and a short distance inland from the beach at Çıralı. The vents are grouped in two clusters on the hillside, spread across an area of about 5,000 square metres, with something in the region of two dozen individual flames alight at any given time. Their size is not constant: the fires are noticeably more vigorous in winter, and the volume of gas escaping shifts through the year with groundwater recharge and changes in atmospheric pressure. Visitors in high summer sometimes find the flames smaller than the photographs suggest, while those who come in the cooler months are often surprised by how strongly they burn.

Estimates of how long the site has been alight run to at least 2,500 years, and the flames were an established landmark on this coast long before anyone wrote them down. The hillside is close enough to the sea that the glow is visible from the water on a dark night. The modern identification of Yanartaş with the Mount Chimaera of the classical texts was made by the British naval surveyor Sir Francis Beaufort, who charted this stretch of coastline in 1811 and concluded that the burning ground above Çıralı matched the descriptions handed down from antiquity.

What Is Actually Burning

The chemistry of the seep has been studied in detail, and the results are stranger than the plain description natural gas would suggest. The vents emit a mixture that is roughly 87 per cent methane, together with 7.5 to 11 per cent hydrogen, 2 to 4.9 per cent nitrogen, small quantities of light alkanes and carbon dioxide, and traces of helium. Around half of that methane is thermogenic — ordinary organic gas generated from Palaeozoic and Mesozoic sedimentary rocks buried beneath the mountain. The other half is abiogenic, meaning it was never produced by living matter at all.

That abiogenic half is what makes Chimaera scientifically significant. It is generated by low-temperature serpentinisation in the Tekirova ophiolite, a slab of ancient oceanic crust and mantle rock thrust up onto the Anatolian landmass. Abiotic methane normally requires high temperatures to form, which for years made the Chimaera gas difficult to account for. Work led by the Italian geochemist Giuseppe Etiope of Rome's National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology showed that ruthenium, a rare metal naturally present in the chromitite rocks of ophiolite complexes, acts as a catalyst allowing methane to form at temperatures below 100 °C — well within the range found beneath Yanartaş. Chimaera is now regarded as probably the largest onshore abiotic gas seep known on Earth, and the research has been cited in discussions of how methane might be produced on Mars with no biology involved at all.

The Myth and the Ruins Below the Flames

The story attached to the site is one of the better known in the Greek repertoire. The Chimera was a fire-breathing hybrid — lion in front, goat in the middle, serpent behind — and it was killed by the hero Bellerophon, riding the winged horse Pegasus. Ancient writers were already trying to rationalise the tale a very long time ago: the physician and historian Ctesias is the oldest traceable author to argue that the monster was really this patch of permanently burning ground in Lycia. Pliny the Elder wrote of the mountain being on fire and recorded that it burned with a flame that does not die by day or night. Not everyone agreed on the location, however. Strabo placed the Chimaera at a ravine on a different Lycian mountain some 75 kilometres to the west, which is part of why the identification took until the nineteenth century to settle. It is worth being clear about the direction of the myth, because retellings often mangle it: Bellerophon is sent against the Chimera and destroys it, not the other way around.

Directly beneath the lower cluster of fires are the remains of a sanctuary dedicated to Hephaistos, the Greek god of fire and metalworking, known to the Romans as Vulcan. The identification rests on altars and statue pedestals found on the spot, which date from the Roman period. Given the god's associations, the choice of location needs no explanation. The site did not lose its significance when the region turned Christian: in the 6th century AD the Byzantines reorganised it into an ecclesiastical centre, building a frescoed church, a chapel and several supporting structures over and around the earlier sanctuary. What you walk past on the way up is therefore layered — Roman religious architecture partly overbuilt by Byzantine church buildings, all of it sitting immediately below flames that have outlasted both.

A short distance away lies the ancient city of Olympos, whose ruins run along a wooded valley down to the sea just south of Çıralı. Strabo names Olympos as one of the six principal members of the Lycian League, entitled to three votes in the federal assembly. In the first century BC the city fell under the control of the pirate chief Zeniketes, whose stronghold was besieged by the Roman commander Publius Servilius Vatia; Olympos was expelled from the League as a consequence and not readmitted until the following century. Christianity reached the city by the 3rd century AD, and it later became a diocese under the metropolitan see of Myra, with nine churches of the Byzantine period identified among the ruins. What survives today includes stretches of fortification wall, a bath complex, temple remains, a triple-arched bridge and streets of tombs, most of it half-buried under laurel and wild fig.

Visiting Yanartaş

Reaching the flames means a climb of about one kilometre from the entrance at the foot of the mountain, on a stepped stone path that gains height steadily through pine woodland. It is not a difficult walk, but the surface is uneven and proper shoes make a real difference. Almost everyone goes at dusk or after dark, when the flames stand out sharply against the black hillside, and a torch for the descent is close to essential since the path is unlit.

The Lycian Way, the long-distance waymarked footpath that follows the old coast road of ancient Lycia, passes directly through the site. The route runs from near Fethiye in the west to the outskirts of Antalya in the east and is now signposted at around 760 kilometres, though older guidebooks describe a shorter version of roughly 540 kilometres; it is marked throughout with the red-and-white stripes of the European long-distance path convention. Walkers on the trail often time their day to arrive at Yanartaş in the evening. Çıralı itself has stayed a low-key village of pensions and orange groves behind a long shingle beach that is a protected nesting site for loggerhead turtles.

Arriving by sea is the least strenuous option of all. Today it is one of the anchorages you'll visit on a private gulet cruise in Turkey, with guests going ashore from Çıralı to see the fire before returning to the boat for the night.