Kirkkuyular

Kirkkuyular means "forty wells", and that is what the place is: a cluster of rock-cut cisterns a kilometre beyond Taslica village, on the track that drops down to Serce Limani at the southern end of the Bozburun peninsula. Around them stand the ruins of the settlement they once supplied. The wells are still in use, which is the part most visitors do not expect.

Why forty wells

This end of the peninsula is limestone, with no permanent streams and unreliable winter rain. Cisterns cut into the rock to catch and hold that rain were the only way to live here at all. Villagers still come down from Taslica to draw water for drinking, for gardens and for animals, and carry it back in balanced containers strapped to donkeys - a sight you can still catch on the first kilometre of the Serce road. Taslica itself, the most remote village in the Marmaris district, solves the same problem the same way, with a cistern at almost every house.

Sindilli: the village that moved uphill

The stone houses beside the wells are what is left of Sindilli, the settlement that stood at the water. It was abandoned in the 1950s, but its people did not go far: they resettled higher up at Taslica and kept working the old land, coming back down to the fields and the cisterns. That is why the site is a ruin with a functioning water system in the middle of it, rather than a place emptied out completely.

What survives is domestic rather than monumental - walls, doorways, the mouths of the cisterns, and terraces that have gone back to scrub. The interest is in how tightly the settlement was built around its water, and in the fact that a village left seventy years ago still has a job to do.

Walking there

Kirkkuyular sits on the walking route between Taslica and the coast. The Carian Trail, the 820 km waymarked long-distance path through south-west Turkey, comes through on its way down from Taslica to the beach at Serce Limani, roughly 8 km from the village. The ground is dry, stony and open, with the sea on one side and low scrub and olive on the other, and there is no water on the way except what the wells hold. Ancient Phoinix, one of the Carian settlements of the peninsula, stood on the high ground by Taslica, and Loryma is a few hours further along the same coast.

Serce Limani

Serce Limani is a narrow, almost enclosed inlet that gives shelter in any weather, which is why blue cruise boats put in and why there is a restaurant on the shore and very little else. It is also one of the more important sites in the history of underwater archaeology. In 1977 George Bass and the Institute of Nautical Archaeology began excavating a ship that sank here around 1025 AD. Its cargo included some three tonnes of broken glass being shipped for remelting, along with intact Islamic glassware - the largest single find of medieval Islamic glass ever made - and the reconstructed hull and its contents are now in the Bodrum Museum of Underwater Archaeology.

Boats anchor in the same inlet that ship was making for, which is what puts the wells within reach: the climb up the old track takes a couple of hours, and the abandoned village at the top is worth a visit if you're chartering a gulet from Marmaris and want a morning ashore that is not another beach. Go early; there is no shade on the way up.