Loryma

On the southwestern tip of ancient Caria, overlooking the narrow strait that separates Anatolia from Rhodes, lie the ruins of Loryma, known locally today as Bozukkale, Turkish for "broken castle" and a nod to the ruined fortress still standing above the bay. The site sits near the southern end of the Bozburun peninsula, roughly 34 kilometres southwest of Marmaris and around 22 kilometres from Rhodes, and it has no road access at all: the only practical ways in are by boat or on foot.

A Fortress Built for Rhodes

The deep, sheltered bay belonged to Rhodes in antiquity. Ancient geographers described Loryma as a small fortified town and harbour on the Carian coast, near Cape Cynossema at the western end of the peninsula they called the Rhodian Chersonese, lying opposite Rhodes and about twenty Roman miles from it. From roughly the middle of the fourth century BC the peninsula formed the core of Rhodes's mainland territory, the Rhodian Peraia, and Loryma's harbour served as a naval base and arsenal guarding the approach to the island.

Its best-preserved feature is the so-called Harbour Fortress on the southern shore, just above the entrance to the bay. It runs about 334 metres long and 36 metres wide along the top of a limestone spur, built from locally quarried stone laid as an inner and an outer face with rubble packed between them. The circuit wall is around 2.5 metres thick and still stands several metres high; eleven towers are attached to it, including a circular one at each of the western and eastern ends and rectangular ones along the flanks. Most carry loopholes, and one tower on the north side has a tall floor-to-ceiling opening interpreted as a position for a catapult. Entry was through a handful of narrow posterns, one of which, on the southeast, survives complete. The fortress is generally dated to the beginning of the 3rd century BC and attributed to Rhodes, and it is often cited as one of the most complete surviving examples of Late Classical and Hellenistic military architecture anywhere on the Turkish coast.

Fleets in the Bay

Because it was the last sheltered anchorage before the open crossing to Rhodes, Loryma turns up repeatedly in ancient accounts of naval campaigns. In 395 BC the Athenian commander Konon assembled ships here in the run-up to the Battle of Knidos, according to Diodorus Siculus. In 305 BC the Macedonian general Demetrios Poliorketes used the bay as a staging point before his celebrated siege of Rhodes, the campaign that earned him the nickname "the Besieger". A Roman fleet gathered here in 190 BC, as recorded by Livy, and Gaius Cassius Longinus, one of Caesar's assassins, brought ships into the same water in 42 BC, as Appian reports. Much later, in 1522, the fleet of Suleiman the Magnificent used the bay on its way to taking Rhodes from the Knights of St John.

The Town, Its Gods and Its Dead

The settlement itself lay apart from the fortress, on a flat hill at the northern end of the bay. Survey work has traced the remains of some 50 modest houses grouped around a central square, enclosed by a two-faced circuit wall still standing up to 2.5 metres high and pierced by six posterns, with a separately fortified acropolis above it built in two phases. Human traces in the area reach back to the Chalcolithic, but permanent settlement appears to begin in the Geometric period, and the real economic boom followed Loryma's absorption into the Rhodian state.

Religion left clear marks. An inscription cut into the rock face just outside the eastern gate of the fortress records an altar to Zeus Atabyrios, one of the principal gods of Rhodes, and is direct evidence of the island exporting its cults to its mainland territory. Other inscriptions in the area point to sanctuaries of Apollo, of Artemis Pergaia and of Kybele, the last including a niche carved into living rock. The necropolis is marked by the stepped monument bases typical of the Carian Chersonese, and half a dozen Byzantine churches survive on the surrounding plains, along with a three-aisled basilica of roughly 14 by 10 metres inserted into the western part of the fortress in the Early Byzantine period.

Loryma also became a Christian bishopric of Caria. The Notitiae episcopatuum list it as a suffragan of Stauropolis, the metropolitan see of the province, up to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and named bishops appear in the conciliar records: George at the Council of Constantinople in 680, Anthimus at the Second Council of Nicaea in 787, and Joseph at the Council of Constantinople in 879. The peninsula seems to have been all but empty between the first century BC and the fourth century AD, repopulated in Early Byzantine times, and in the late Middle Ages the bay appears on portolan charts as an Amalfitan anchorage.

Rediscovery, and Reaching Loryma Today

Western travellers began noting the ruins in the mid-nineteenth century, William Martin Leake and Ludwig Ross among them, and the Austrian scholars Otto Benndorf and Georg Niemann produced the first site plan in the 1880s. The British travellers Theodore and Mabel Bent explored this stretch of the Carian Chersonese in March 1888. Systematic work came much later: the German archaeologist Winfried Held ran an intensive survey beginning in 1995 and continuing from 1999 to 2001, across ground that has barely been built on since antiquity.

That is still largely true. There is no road, no ticket office and no village at Loryma; a few simple restaurants line the shore, the nearest accommodation is at Taşlıca about ten kilometres north, and walkers can reach the bay from Serçe Limanı in roughly four hours on the Carian Trail. For most visitors, though, the approach is from the water. Because it sits at the tip of the Bozburun peninsula within sight of Rhodes, Loryma has become a fixture of the sailing itinerary out of Marmaris, and many gulet cruises from Marmaris call in here to anchor for the night beneath the fortress walls.