News From the Interzone: Pinara, Turkey, January 2001

The next day was extremely active and I am still amazed that Jo managed to rouse us all from our hangover induced trance and get us into the jeep. Coffee and breakfast was much in need so we headed down to Oludeniz in hopes of finding a restaurant.

Now Oludeniz is one of the nicest beaches on the Turquoise coast. The water is true to its name and shimmers with an incredible blue--fantastic really. However it is best to visit off season for several reasons. Firstly the place is less populated, mellower and the water cleaner then--also unfortunately the municipality has chosen to place enormous floodlights over the beach during summer at night, effectively destroying any aesthetics appeal of the place after dark. Anyways at the end of the beach there is an incredible lagoon that gives the place its name (read as dead sea) and which features in many posters and guides to tourism in Turkey.. although somewhat overdeveloped and a little damaged it remains very beautiful...

Winter was still deep here and literally nothing was open, so after a quick visit to the lagoon (where our jeep was attacked by vicious geese) we headed back up to Fethiye for some food.. it was as it turned out hard to find a restaurant open there as well, but we finally managed and had a hearty repast. So finally feasted, we set out to see the ancient Lycian wonders of the Xanthos river valley. First we drove up to Pinara, a spectacular site set on the top of a mountain overlooking the valley below.

Much of the site remains still unexcavated apparently and a great deal of it at the very summit of the mountain. Upon approaching one sees the resplendent cliff face dotted with numerous Lycian rock-cut tombs--they are inaccessible to all but the hardiest climbers and one wonders how they managed to carve them there at all. From the car-park it is a hefty climb to the lower town, which is full of ruins, mostly Roman to appearance, although we lacked a site plan and in its mostly unexcavated state it was quite hard to make sense of the various masonries. However there were evident a series of fortification walls, an agora, several temples dedicated to the ancient gods, a theatre, a lower acropolis and various other buildings. My friends were taking some time to ascend so I became impatient and pushed on through the ruins as is my wont, and soon found myself drawn towards the summit, where evidently the remains of the upper city, necropolis and acropolis beckoned. I didn't know if I would have time as we still had lots to see that day, but I thought I would get up as far as I could.

As I approached the face of the cliff I heard approaching from ahead and above a flock of sheep accompanied by its shepherd. Upon drawing near I greeted him and his companion, a wizened old Turk with a shotgun held broken upon his shoulder--he stopped to speak with me for a moment in the lilting Turkish speech of the countryside--clear and simple, just the way I like it--in any case he informed me he was a hunter from the village below and that he was searching for wild boar. His name was Bayram. I told him I intended to visit the summit and he offered to accompany me. I agreed as the shadows were beginning to lengthen and it can never hurt to have a native guide in such places. He assured me that we could ascend one side, visit the acropolis and descend along the other side down to the site below. We ascended, quite rapidly I might add, and I was hard pressed to keep up with him, unencumbered as I was, although he had his hunting bag and weapon. He was 63 years old he told me and had done the climb almost daily for his entire life. I had the profound feeling that although he had the features of the typical Anatolian peasant, he shared some true ancestry with the ancient of Pinara--it seemed not at all unlikely that if we were to unearth a corpse from the nearby necropolis and compare its DNA with his, he would prove to be a direct descendent of the denizens of this marvelous place.

I wanted to hurry as my friends were still below in the ruins, and we could catch glimpses of them occasionally--but they showed no signs of ascending and I knew we had hoped to see other things still that day. So once at the top, we shouted down as best we could to the others but I am not sure that they could tell from whence my cries were coming. There were sparse ruins up top, but the view was quite magnificent and well worth the climb--additionally it gave a wondrous perspective of the site below and enabled the envisioning of the ancient city in its grandeur. Furthermore Bayram was able to point out various features of the site with which he was familiar and which I wouldn't have noticed without his assistance.

Anyways, we proceeded across the acropolis and began to descend on the other side, navigating narrow goat paths down the face above the rock cut tombs. it wasn't until we had descended some distance (in other words when it was really too late) that I realized that there was no path and that we were following Bayram Avci's dead-reckoning down the face where his ancestors had carved impossible tombs in the steep precipice. Well I was quite frightened as I am not an expert climber, however it was hard to deny this spry old man, who kept on insisting that it was easy and nothing to be worried about--what made me most uncomfortable was that it had rained very hard two days before and the rock and soil were quite moist and slippery--nonetheless I followed my intrepid guide, confident that we made a fine pair, and I wavered between laughter and fear all the way down. It was on the whole a truly excellent experience, exacerbated in its excitement by the fact that about halfway down I noted that my friends were nowhere to be seen and that our jeep was no longer in the car-park where we had left it.

Upon reaching the bottom there was still much of the ancient city to traverse to reach the car-park from the far side of the site--I found myself running through temples and theatre, hopping over the desolated columns of the priscine stoa. In any case I soon found my friends--they had moved the car to the far side when they realized that i had crossed the acropolis--they were only mildly irritated at me for the delay, and after saying farewell to Bayram and thanking him for his assistance, we were back on the road and blazing across the valley in hopes of catching the sunset at Tlos.

We made good time and in fact arrived at the ridge on the opposite side of the valley just as the sun was beginning to touch the horizon--Jo and I leapt from the car and ran through the brush at the base of the ruined castle of Kanli Ali (Ali the Bloody, a notoriously violent Turkish warlord) and along to the Hellenistic and Roman ruins of the ancient resort town of Tlos to the Yedi Kapi, or seven gates, magnificent arched windows facing out over the valley and offering a fantastic view of the the breadth of the Xanthic plain. It was really magnificent and I hope to visit the site again some day, though I don't see how it could offer any better. After the sun dropped below the horizon we wound our way through the remains of a Byzantine palace, part of a Roman bath and along the opposite base of the castle from the one we had entered. On the flanks of the castles base numerous Lycian rock-cut tombs were still evident, although it became too dark for us to explore them and our hunger was calling. It had been a full day and these sites are both marvelous--we were the only ones at either site--much as all of the ruins of Turkey must have been before the onset of tourism. We reembarked in the jeep and headed back into Fethiye where we had a very fine dinner. The others had planned to leave again on the late bus so after returning the jeep in Hisaronu I accompanied them to the Otogar and bade them adieu.