Patara: an amazing ancient city in Turkey

View from Patara's ancient theatre over the central area of the site

Imagine a spacious coastal valley, separated from the Mediterranean Sea by tall sand dunes. At its centre lies a swampy lake, surrounded by a small plain which is overlooked by hills on three sides. And all this scenery is literally filled with ancient ruins: millennia-old roadways, vaults, arches, walls, pillars and entire buildings everywhere, some barely sticking out of the ground, others excavated and restored, and the soil between them littered with vast quantities of broken pottery.

This is Patara, one of the most impressive and most fascinating among the many archaeological sites in Western Lycia on the southern shore of Turkey, and one of the highlights on our escorted tours and gulet cruises in the area. The sheer extent of the ancient city is enormous, the preservation of its remains unusual even for Turkey, a land abounding in astonishingly well-preserved sites. Nonetheless, Patara is hardly a household name even for adepts of archaeology or of the ancient world, unless they have travelled in the area. Student textbooks on Greek or Roman architecture do not usually mention the site and even advanced literature does not necessarily refer to it.

A colonnade flanks the Roman main road through Patara in Turkey

Why? Probably for two reasons. Firstly, the site, although known to and visited by English, French and German scholars since the 19th century, used to be covered in windblown sand and has only been subject to systematic excavation (by Turkish archaeologists from Antalya University) since 1988  - in scholarly terms, that is recent. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, Patara is a place of moderate rather than huge historical significance, despite being Lycia's primary seaport and once a leading city of the Lycian League): it does make the occasional appearance in ancient literature, but scarcely enough to make the headlines. Nonetheless, recent discoveries and ambitious restoration works has shed new light on this Lycian city.

The monumental bouleuterion or council house of Patara

The monumental bouleuterion or council house of Patara, one of the best preserved from the ancient world even before its recent restoration. There was probably a religious sanctuary at Patara already in Hittite times, in the second millennium BC, as attested by a text mentioning a visit by the king Tudḫaliya IV (1236-1210 BC) who made an offering there. We have no idea what deity would have been worshipped, but we do know that a thousand years later it was an important oracle associated with the god Apollo, as the great Greek historian Herodotus in the mid-fifth century BC indicates. Supposedly settled by Cretans, Patara appears to have  initially functioned as the harbour for Xanthos, the occasional capital of Lycia, from the 7th or 6th century BC. It is not mentioned in the late fifth century BC Athenian tribute lists (long inscribed lists of cities which funded the Athenian empire/Delian League), but this is hardly surprising, as the Xanthians appear to have defeated an Athenian force trying to exert contributions to the Delian League. Along with the rest of Lycia, it surrendered to Alexander the Great in 334 BC. It is in the ages after Alexander, in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, that Patara reached the height of its importance, primarily as a naval base. First used by the Macedonian kings, it later fell to the Ptolemaic rulers of Egypt (and was even called Arsinoe for a while, after the wife and sister of Ptolemy II), later to the Antigonids of Syria, probably also temporarily to Rhodes and eventually to Rome. From the second century BC onwards, it was the nominal capital of the Lycian League, an early federation of city states designed to retain a certain degree of local control during the complex struggles of that period.

The city appears to have thrived in Roman times, especially in the first few centuries AD, when it eclipsed Xanthos. St. Paul reports changing ships at Patara and the city certainly became an early centre of Christianity in the region. St Nicholas of Myra was born at Patara.

Patara’s political and architectural peaks date from the Hellenistic and Roman periods, even if we’ve seen that its history has much deeper roots than that. Nonetheless, its fate was sealed from the day it was founded. The Xanthos river, along which Patara was settled and which gave its name to the eponymous city, was continuously pouring silt from the highlands, gradually filling up the bay where the harbour was installed, until eventually access to the sea became impossible around the 14^th-15^th centuries AD. The harbor turned into a swamp and Patara was then sundered from its very ‘raison d’être’. The city declined rapidly and was abandoned, never to be reoccupied as an urban settlement again. This is mainly why its remains, never built over, never quarried and eventually covered by sand, are so well preserved today.

The North gate erected when Mettius Modestus was Roman Governor

So, our reader may ask what there is to see at Patara. Our writer has to ask where to start because of the depth of Patara’s history and the wealth of its archaeology. There is a whole ancient city there, scattered over an area well beyond a square kilometre and inviting thorough exploration. Most of the archaeological remains now visible are from the late Hellenistic and Roman periods. But Patara’s history started long long ago, probably in the late chalcolithic period when a first settlement took place on what became later the city’s Acropolis. All along the second millennium BC, artefacts found during the excavations tell us a story of a settlement that is already in contact with overseas regions, confirming that this location and its natural harbor was deeply rooted. In historical times, historian Hecataeus of Miletus, who wrote in the late sixth and early fifth centuries BC, tells us that Pataros, son of Apollo, was the Greek founder of the city where he established a temple to his father.

The archaeological and architectural highlights of the Ancient city are numerous. They include a particularly grandiose theatre built probably in the first century BC. The building, which could afford 6,000 people space over 38 rows of seats, went through several construction phases including the addition in the Roman period of a crowning temple, aligned with the theatre’s central axis. These theatre temples, the earliest known example of which is the Theatre of Pompey in Rome, are particularly scarce in Anatolia. The nearby recently restored bouleuterion or council house, which appears to have been the seat of the assembly for the Lycian League, also stands as an architectural wonder since it is one of best preserved of Anatolia. Later transformed into an odeion, a roofed theater favored in Roman times especially for musical performance, it became the largest indoor structure of Ancient Anatolia with a capacity of 1,400 people. One could also mention the ancient colonnaded street, another of Patara’s delicacies for the visitor. Built along the line of the old road going through the city, it was enhanced in the Roman period and adorned with two side-porticoes.

Second century AD horreum or granary used by the Roman army

The restauration work conducted there is giving Patara a grandiose allure and a feeling of being able to walk in the steps of the Ancients while visiting the site. We could go on like that for a while, mentioning not only several huge Roman baths and a monumental city gate, fortification walls from various periods, the unique second century AD horreum (a storehouse for grain and other goods used by the Roman army), a strong Byzantine (?) fortification incorporating a Roman (or earlier) temple… But that would be mean forgetting the many remains further afield, such as the graves and cemeteries ranging from prehistoric to Late Roman times, including pristine Lycian monolithic sarcophagi in front of which passes a section of the Roman aqueduct that supplied Patara with fresh water from mountainside sources stretching for nearly 20km and including a section where it runs downhill first and then uphill, using the inverted siphon principle unique to the most sophisticated Roman water supply systems. Even all this would be an understatement of Patara’s attractions!

The ruins of the lighthouse at Patara

What recently became the crown jewel of the site is the recently restored lighthouse of the city, one of the very few surviving from antiquity. As indicated by a sizeable inscription discovered near the building, it was erected by the emperor Nero in the first century AD for the ‘salvation of sailors’. Although it was almost completely destroyed in the 15^th century by what is known as the 1481 Rhodes earthquake – an event that decimated many cities in southwestern Asia Minor (estimation of the casualties reach 30,000) and provoked a devastating tsunami in the region – most of its architectural members came to light during the excavations of 2004-2005. The remains of the building were found under one of the highest dunes surrounding the site. Under a pile of blocks, archaeologists brought to light a very large square podium of roughly 400m² upon which stood the original tower-like pharos. Restoration work started almost immediately after the discovery of the remains and are now almost complete. The lighthouse originally reached a height of 26 m above its podium. It was built using the oldest architectural principles: a series of concentric tapering cylinders comprising a solid core of 1.20 m in diameter, surrounded by a 90 cm wide spiral staircase protected by a large outer double-skinned plain wall. Today, the lighthouse rises well above all other remains at the site and can be seen from kilometres around, even possibly from Rhodes once it will be lit again!

Now, the picture of a short description of Patara wouldn’t be complete if we didn’t put it in its local landscape. At the beginning, we mentioned the dunes surrounding the city. We forgot to mention that Patara is literally located at a stone’s throw from one of the largest and most beautiful sand beaches of Turkey. Sand beaches are particularly rare in Lycia, where the mountains dive directly into the sea. At Patara, you would find an exception to this dramatic landscape. Actually, this natural configuration is so rare that Patara’s beach became one of the most important Mediterranean sanctuaries for the loggerhead sea turtle (Caretta caretta), an endangered species that comes and nests here as soon as the sun sets.

View over the theatre at Patara towards the beach

Intrigued? You can visit Patara easily from Kalkan, a major resort town on the coast of Lycia. Of course, the best way to explore such a large and complex archaeological site is to come with us one of our expert-led tours in Turkey.