The Blue Lagoon in Ölüdeniz, seen from the Lycian Trail.
The Lycian Way was Turkey's first long-distance footpath, established in 1999 by Kate Clow, a British amateur historian living in Turkey, and her collaborator Dean Livesley. The route was not invented so much as rediscovered. It stitches together ancient trade routes, Roman roads, nomadic migration paths and mule tracks that had never entirely fallen out of use. Walking it, you're not really walking a modern trail. This is something much, much older.
The Sunday Times named the Lycian Way one of the world’s top ten walks and in 2025, Time Out named it the world’s most beautiful hiking trail. Both assessments are defensible, though neither quite captures what makes it unusual. The joy of this route is not just the dramatic beauty of the landscape, although it’s hard to find parallel for the experience of walking a path with sweeping views down from mountainsides and pine swathed hills to the exquisitely turquoise sea. Above all, the Lycian Way is an archaeological experience unlike any other.
Navigating the trail
Being present and observant is important on the Lycian Way. The route of the trail is marked by periodic flashes of red and white paint on rock and bark; distinctive waymarks that comprise the essential infrastructure of the trail.
The style of marking follows the tradition of European long-distance paths, but the comparison stops there. This is not a manicured trail. The surface underfoot changes constantly: Roman paving worn smooth; loose limestone scree on exposed ridgelines; soft woodland tracks beneath a canopy of pine and carob trees; the ubiquitous maquis, a thorny scrub that inexorably encroaches upon the path. Sections that look straightforward on a map can take twice as long as expected from one year to the next.
The waymarks are maintained by a committed network of volunteers, armed with brushes and pots of paint, across 540 kilometres of the Turkish coastline. This is the thread that holds together one of the most archaeologically dense walking routes in the world. Follow it from Ölüdeniz to the mountains above Antalya and you'll pass through twenty-five centuries of human occupation without ever straying far from the sea.
You don’t simply visit archaeological sites from the Lycian Way, the entire route is alive with history. The paths you follow were used by merchants bringing goods to trade in commercial markets 2000 years ago and by Roman legions heading for the eastern frontier. That deep cistern you pass by was cut into the hillside to collect rainwater for a way of life that no longer exists.
One of the rocky, narrow trails on the Lycian Way.
The Archaeology of the Lycian Way
The Kingdom of Lycia and its Legacy in Death
The Lycian Way traverses the ancient region of Lycia - the mountainous southwestern corner of modern Turkey where the Taurus mountain range meets the Mediterranean. For much of its early history, Lycia was a fiercely independent federation of cities, for a time with their own language, alphabet and funerary traditions. Its distinct approach to political organisation, in the form of the Lycian League, was so sophisticated that Alexander Hamilton and James Madison studied it when drafting the American Constitution.
Hundreds of Lycian tombs survive along the route in several distinct types. At Xanthos, the early capital of the federation, stands the Harpy Monument: a tall monolithic pillar topped with a grave chamber whose carved reliefs show a blend of ancient Greek and Persian motifs, including mythological sirens carrying the souls of the dead. Pillar tombs are the oldest form of tomb to be found here, dating from as early as the 6th century BCE. These were the preserves of the earliest dynasts, designed to keep the honoured dead close to the gods and far from the reach of grave robbers.
Ancient stone theatre ruins at Xanthos, featuring the Harpy Tomb pillar.
House-tombs, often either free-standing or carved into rock faces, mimic timber architecture, probably our way of picturing the houses of the ancient Lycians, and are distinctive for their stone versions of wooden beams, joints and gables. They are so accurate in their detail that they preserve the memory of a building tradition that still echoes in the tradition of wooden grain stores - ambars – that we see alongside the Lycian Way and still in use in the upland villages of the region. Built without nails, often from cedar and juniper, the construction of the ambars seems identical to the wooden forms that the ancient house-tombs were imitating. The same structural logic, the same carpentry tradition, repeated continuously in this one region for 2,500 years.
Hundreds of sarcophagi can also be seen along the Lycian Way. Many have pointed, ogival lids that look almost Gothic, cut from single limestone blocks. Finally, the distinctive funerary monument known as the temple-tomb becomes more popular when the Lycians come under the influence of Greek culture from the 4th century BCE. These are elaborate affairs with Ionic columns and pediments, built for the wealthiest individuals and designed to resemble banqueting halls or temples to the gods that pilgrims or travellers at the time would have seen being built in contemporary Athens or throughout the classical world.
Two ancient Lycian sarcophagi with distinctive crested stone lids at Kyaneai.
Many of these different types of tomb can be seen at Sidyma, a small ancient city that sits in a natural amphitheatre high in the foothills of Mount Cragus. Here, the monuments are not cordoned off behind fences and ticket booths. They are still part of a living village. The rustic homes and farmhouses of this tiny hamlet are built against ancient terrace walls; sarcophagi sit alongside vegetable gardens, or are used as watering troughs or simply left as part of the ramshackle charm of a place where people have lived continuously for over 2,500 years.
A spur of the Lycian Way passes directly through the village. As you leave Sidyma on the rock hewn path you pass by more tumbled down sarcophagi, an Ottoman ambar with its locking mechanism still intact, and the ruins of a Hellenistic watchtower. Sometimes a local dog will follow you for a while, keeping your company. This is what it feels like to walk the Lycian Way rather than simply visit it.
Ancient stone tombs with gabled roofs in the foreground of the ruins of Sidyma.
Engineering Marvels in the Age of the Romans
Lycia was absorbed into the Roman empire in 43 CE, and the physical evidence of that incorporation is everywhere along the route. At the ancient port city of Patara a monumental triple-arched gate announces the entrance to the city with an inscription naming the governor responsible, Mettius Modestus. Nearby a granary of extraordinary scale, built by the emperor Hadrian, and a Roman lighthouse, one of the oldest and best surviving examples anywhere, still mark the mouth of what was once a busy harbour, where St. Paul changed ships, now silted up into a flat alluvial plain.
View of the ancient theatre and ruins of Patara.
In the time of the Romans, Patara was also the home of the Lycian League and each city in the league received a weighted vote in federal decisions. The council chamber at Patara was the auditorium where delegates gathered and it still stands today. It is one of the oldest surviving democratic assembly buildings in the world. While much of this ancient metropolis still lies largely unexcavated beneath the dunes, what is visible is extraordinary.
One of the most rewarding sections of the Lycian Way directly follows the line of the aqueduct to Patara, an engineering marvel that brought life-giving water into the city during the Roman period. One of the Lycian Way’s less well-known revelations awaits us at a place on the aqueduct line called Delikkemer, a short ascent from the idyllic cove where we overnight on board our gulet. Here, the aqueduct’s engineers solved a straightforward logistical problem - how to get water across a deep valley. The solution looks improbable even now. Instead of building a towering aqueduct bridge, engineers constructed an inverted siphon: interlocking hollowed limestone blocks that carried water under pressure on a sturdy wall down into the valley and up the other side. The system worked on the same hydraulic principle as a modern U-bend, creating immense pressures over its 175 metres length. In inscriptions and archaeological evidence still visible on site, the story of the entire remarkable history of the structure can be told.
The ancient Roman Delikkemer Aqueduct, showing its unique stone-pipe wall design .
In the Shadow of St Nicholas
While Lycia’s early history is defined by its fiercely independent dynasts, its late Roman and Byzantine identity is inseparable from the cult of Saint Nicholas. While we often think of him as a figure of the snowy north, his origins are entirely Mediterranean and several important sites relating to his life and miracles lie along the Lycian Way: he was born in Patara and his most famous miracles were performed while he was Bishop of Myra.
On the steep, uninhabited island known as Gemiler near Fethiye we find the remains of a large Byzantine pilgrimage centre, connected with Nicholas, either the major saint himself or a martyr who bore his name. Japanese archaeological excavations have revealed four churches and a unique vaulted corridor, some 160 meters long, that allowed pilgrims to process from the harbour to the summit church without being exposed to the elements or the gaze of the curious. Before his bones were famously spirited away to Bari, Italy, this island may have been one of the primary shrines to Saint Nick [link to Gemiler Blog].
The Byzantine church ruins on Gemiler Island.
Kekova and the Sunken Coast
The remote section of the Lycian Way around Kekova shows what happens when the geology moves faster than human adaptation. Tectonic shifts have submerged the ancient shoreline by several metres and the ruins of the ancient harbours here now sit below the waterline - their jetties, wharfs and slipways visible through the clear water from our gulet. Sarcophagi stand in the shallows, half-submerged, their lids intact.
Above the water, a Byzantine and perhaps Crusader or Ottoman Castle built on earlier foundations towers overs the ancient ruins. It contains a tiny rock-cut theatre, with seating for no more than 300. The scale of it is striking and it must surely be one of the smallest surviving theatres from the ancient world. This was not a grand civic monument but something more intimate; a theatre or council chamber for a small community on a narrow coastal strip, carved opportunistically into the rocky slope.
The famous sunken sarcophagus of Simena.
The Ghost Town at Kayaköy
Not all the ruins on the Lycian Way are ancient. Kayaköy, known in Greek as Levissi, is an abandoned Greek settlement of roughly 400 stone houses on a hillside near Ölüdeniz, famous for its exceptional 17/18/19th-century Greek craftsmanship, with beautifully ornamented and frescoed churches in the Dodecanese style, several chapels, schools, public fountains, cobblestone streets and windmills.
The town was abandoned in 1923, when Greece and Turkey carried out a religious population exchange that displaced around 1.5 million people. A large Greek Orthodox community from the region left and were replaced by a smaller influx of Muslim communities from northern Greece. Levissi was not significantly repopulated and it has been more or less empty ever since - a perfectly preserved, quietly devastating record of a community's removal. Wandering through it, with its intact walls and collapsed roofs, feels different from standing in a Roman ruin. The timescale is too short for comfort and its stones speak of a traumatic and transformative period in the history of the region.
The abandoned stone houses of Kayaköy ghost town.
How to experience the Lycia Way: planning your visit
April and May are the months when the wildflowers are at their best and October brings cooler temperatures. Both seasons are manageable. High summer is not. Above 30°C the exposed ridge walks become genuinely unpleasant, and above 40°C, which is possible in July and August, they become dangerous.
Most people walk sections rather than the whole route. The stretch across the mouth of the Xanthos valley, taking in Patara and Delikkemer, is among the most rewarding for anyone interested in the ancient world. The westernmost section starting at Ölüdeniz offers staggering coastal views and is accessible from Fethiye and Dalaman airport. The coastal sections around Kaş and Kekova offer something different - smaller in scale, more intimate and remote. The best way to experience the Lycian Way is to combine gulet-based travel along the coast, with expertly curated day hikes in the company of archaeologists on one of Peter Sommer Travels’ Lycian hiking tours.
By the 2500 year old pillar tomb at the entrance to the ancient city of Sidyma
For those unfamiliar with Turkey, it’s worth saying plainly: the rural southwest is a very safe place to visit. Looking at a zoomed out map of the whole region, one sees that Turkey borders the Middle East, always in the middle of some uncertainty or turmoil, but to stand on the quayside in Kaş or among the ruins of Sidyma, is to experience a world entirely removed from it. Turkey is vast - larger than any European country - and Lycia sits near its westernmost edge, nearly a thousand kilometres from the Syrian border. While news reports can make the entire region feel like a single, homogenous entity, the reality on the ground in the southwest of Turkey is one of tranquility, stability and hospitality.
We choose our routes not just for their historical depth, but for the peace they afford. These quiet corners of the Mediterranean remain what they have always been: remote, unhurried, and remarkably safe and breathtaking places to explore.
One thing most of our guests notice within a day or two: the noise stops. The whir of the cicadas remains, the rustle of the breeze in the sails, the bleat of an occasional goat along the path, but what’s gone is the low-grade static of modern life, the notifications and obligations and background hum of things that need doing. This fades surprisingly fast when your main task is following a red and white painted flash on a rock. Somewhere along the ancient path between Fethiye and Antalya, the modern world no longer matters.
You can experience this fascinating ancient coastline on Cruising the Lycian Shore or Cruising Western Lycia or on our hiking and walking cruises Walking and Cruising Western Lycia or Walking and Cruising the Lycian Shore.
View over Kale harbor (and one of our gulets) out towards Kekova island from the castle on top of the ancient city of Simena
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