The Ancient City of Kedrai

Kedrai was a small Carian city on Sedir Island, the largest of a group of three islets in the Gulf of Gokova, within the Ula district of Mugla province and roughly 23 km north of Marmaris. Boats cross to it from Camli, on the Marmaris side of the gulf, and from Akyaka. Most people come for the beach; the ruins spread across the island are the reason the whole place is fenced, ticketed and watched.

Cedars, tribute lists and Lysander

The name comes from the Greek word for cedar, the tree that once covered the island and supplied timber for buildings and for ships - which is how a place this small ended up trading well beyond its own waters. Kedrai appears in the tribute lists of the Delian League between 454 and 428 BC, putting it in the Athenian sphere through the fifth century. In 405 BC, in the last months of the Peloponnesian War, the Spartan admiral Lysander sailed into the Keramos gulf, took the city by storm on the second day of the assault and enslaved its population, whom Xenophon describes as of mixed Greek and Carian descent. Afterwards the island passed into the orbit of Rhodes.

What is still standing

Fragments of the city wall and its towers ring the eastern side of the island, along with the line of the ancient harbour. The theatre, cut into the slope on the east, held about 2,500 people and its seating has survived in good condition. There is a sanctuary of Apollo, an agora, the foundations of a basilica and other church buildings from the Byzantine centuries, and carved sarcophagi lying in the scrub between olive trees and pines.

Cleopatra Beach and where its sand actually comes from

The beach on the northwest shore is what fills the boats. It is a short strip of pale grains that are almost perfectly spherical and feel nothing like ordinary sand underfoot. The story attached to it says Mark Antony had the sand shipped from Egypt so that Cleopatra would have a beach worthy of her.

Geologists have tested the claim. The grains are ooids, and a 2021 study in the Turkish Journal of Earth Sciences traced them to a Neogene oolitic sandstone bed that dips beneath the shoreline and is being eroded in place by the waves; the same bed continues into the shallow marine deposits exposed on both sides of the bay. Earlier comparisons of the Sedir grains with Alexandria beach sand found clear differences in size, sorting and the nuclei inside the ooids. The sand is made where it lies, and it is still being made.

Because it cannot be replaced, the beach is managed tightly. Visitors keep to wooden walkways, swimming is allowed only from a marked section, and taking sand away is prohibited - grains carried out in a towel or a sandal do not come back. The shallows are warm and calm, which makes the permitted stretch better for wading than for a long swim.

Visiting

Sedir Island is a first-degree archaeological site and a first-degree natural protected area, and it also falls inside a Special Environmental Protection Area. Access is by boat only; the crossing from Camli is short, and the island is small enough to cover in a morning - theatre, walls, beach - before the afternoon breeze gets up in the gulf. There is shade under the pines and olives, but little else, so bring water.

Gokova is one of the quieter cruising grounds on this coast, and the run north from Marmaris passes a string of coves with no road access at all, which is why many visitors combine a day of sightseeing with a private gulet charter from Marmaris rather than making the trip as a single day excursion.