Phaselis Ancient City

The ruins of Phaselis lie on a pine-covered spit of coast beside Tekirova, in the Kemer district of Antalya Province, roughly 16 km south of Kemer and about an hour by road from Antalya. Few ancient cities in Turkey are so easy to reach and so hard to leave: three small beaches, a paved avenue running from the water's edge into the pine woods, and the grey bulk of Mount Tahtali, at 2,365 m the highest peak of the Bey range, standing behind the trees. According to ancient tradition the city was founded in 690 BC by settlers from Rhodes, who chose a narrow isthmus between two natural harbours that made it an important trading link between Greece, Anatolia, Egypt and Phoenicia.

A Rhodian Colony on the Lycian Border

Phaselis grew up on the frontier between the ancient regions of Lycia and Pamphylia, and it never quite belonged to either. Its wealth came from the sea rather than from farmland, and its earliest coins carry the prow of a ship as the city's emblem. Like the rest of western Anatolia it fell under Persian control after the conquest of Asia Minor in the mid sixth century BC, and it was prised loose again in 469 BC, when the Athenian general Cimon attacked the city and enrolled it in the Delian League. Later centuries brought a rotation of overlords typical of the Lycian coast: Ptolemaic rule between 209 and 197 BC, then Rhodian control from about 190 to 160 BC, after which Phaselis was absorbed into the Lycian League.

Its most famous visitor arrived in 333 BC. Rather than resist, the Phaselites sent gifts of gold out to meet Alexander the Great and surrendered before he reached the walls; he wintered in the city during his march along the Lycian shore. Plutarch preserves a small scene from that stay, in which Alexander, walking through the town after dinner, crowned the statue of the poet Theodectes with garlands. Theodectes was a son of Phaselis, a tragic poet and rhetorician of some standing in fourth-century Greece, and he was not the only one: the sophist Lacritus and the Peripatetic philosopher Critolaus also came from here. The city's patron was Athena, and her temple was said to hold the lance of Achilles among its treasures.

Three Harbours and the Roman Century

Strabo records three harbours at Phaselis, and all three can still be traced. The northern harbour, linked by a causeway to two islets, was the largest and served as the naval anchorage. The small central or military harbour covers only about 0.95 hectares and was ringed by a seawall that could be closed with an 18-metre chain slung between two towers, a precaution that says a great deal about how dangerous these waters could be. The southern harbour, the most sheltered of the three, had a pier that ran out 183 m from the city walls.

The danger was real. Piracy along the Lycian coast reached the point where the brigand chief Zenicetes controlled Phaselis and neighbouring Olympos outright, until Roman forces broke him in 77-76 BC; Brutus formally tied the city to Rome in 42 BC. What followed was the city's most prosperous stretch. The Agora of Domitian was built in AD 93, and when the emperor Hadrian passed through in AD 129 on his tour of Asia Minor, the city answered with a second agora and the monumental single-arched gate that still carries his name. A colonnaded avenue about 225 m long ran from the central harbour to that gate, lined with shops and public buildings, and it remains the spine of the site. On the west side stands the second-century theatre, twenty-one rows deep and holding somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 spectators, with Tahtali framed above the stage. Perhaps the most striking survival is the aqueduct: a run of some 450 m of piers, arches and ceramic pipework carrying spring water from the hill behind the northern harbour down towards the agora. Roman baths, a gymnasium and an extensive necropolis complete the picture.

Bishops, Raids and a Slow Abandonment

Phaselis became a Christian bishopric under the metropolitan see of Myra, and its bishop Fronto attended the Council of Chalcedon in 451. The long decline that followed had little to do with faith and everything to do with security. Renewed piracy from the third century AD onwards, then repeated Arab raids during the Byzantine period, made an exposed coastal port an increasingly poor bet, while the growth of better-defended harbours at Antalya and Alanya drew trade away. The anchorages had largely fallen out of use by around the 11th century, and the Seljuk advance along this coast in the following decades finished the job; the takeover of the region in 1158 is conventionally taken as the end of urban life at Phaselis. The sea, though, kept a longer memory than the streets: underwater surveys carried out between 2012 and 2023 recovered material ranging from the late fourth century BC to the 12th and 13th centuries AD, evidence that ships were still sheltering here long after the city itself had emptied.

The Site Today

Phaselis sits inside Olympos Beydaglari Coastal National Park, declared on 16 March 1972 and covering some 34,425 hectares between Sarisu, south-west of Antalya, and Cape Gelidonya. Olympos and Idyros lie within the same protected belt, which is why the ruins are approached through unbroken pine forest rather than through hotels. Scientific excavation began in 1980 and has been continuous since 2012 under the Phaselis Project run by Akdeniz University, with restoration work on Hadrian's Gate and a repaving of the ancient avenue completed in recent seasons.

For visitors, the appeal is the mixture. You can walk the length of the avenue, climb to the theatre, then swim off one of the three beaches that the ancient harbours became, with column drums and cut blocks lying in the shallows. Arriving from the water is the oldest way of all, and many visitors combine a day of sightseeing with a private gulet charter along the Turkey coast, dropping anchor in the same bays that once held cargo ships bound for Egypt and Phoenicia.