The Sunken City

Tuesday, 4 October

We headed back north after Çirali because we knew we wanted to catch the ferry to Greece towards the end of the week. Several weeks ago while in Sirince we met a Turkish couple from Istanbul who suggested an area to visit with a sunken city of ruins to explore. We followed their advice and headed to Ucagiz to catch a boat to a town named Kekova or Kale or Simena. My road maps and books were not consistent and not clear but we called a pension and they sent a boat to get us in the middle of a rain and thunder storm. Actually the father of the Yasin, the pension owner, picked us up. I am still uncertain of the village’s true name but it was a mystic place with one civilization built on top of another over and over. As we drove towards Ucagiz I thought how old and tired the land seemed. It appeared used by humans forever. The soil was dry and dusty and old stonewalls laced the hills. Scrubby bushes covered the land that was not fields. Even after countless generations of farming rocks still litter the fields. Now greenhouses covered the villages and fields. The soil in the green houses seemed much richer. Doug and I guessed the greenhouses must provide a more controllable environment for the farmers. I have never seen so many greenhouses at once. We also saw the strangest structure - a columned entrance carved into the face of a rock several stories high. The entrance seemed to be into a cave or rock dwelling. It was in the distance across some farmer’s fields so we did not investigate up close.

The village, we will call it Simena, because we saw a postcard in the village with that name, was built on the water’s edge and then continued up the hill towards the acropolis at the summit. We ended up staying in the upstairs pair of rooms of a set of four rooms in a building half way up the hill. The views of the bay and island across were spectacular. Downstairs from us a French woman named Katrine was staying and we crashed her quiet breakfast on the terrace the first morning. At first we thought we might be disturbing her, but then found out she was a grandma and we all became friends. She was interested in the boys and their adventures. Liam and Katrine tried to figure out English words that came from Turkish. Doug and I were fascinated because Katrine had just retired from the education branch of the European Commission. We learned a lot about the political wranglings of the EC and Turkey’s attempts to break into it. Katrine had spent the last seven years shuttling between Turkey and Brussels.

The first afternoon we sat on our terrace and watched the school children get off the boat. They had a school boat instead of a school bus. When the rain clouds cleared we climbed the path to the acropolis. The feeling of layered civilizations intrigued me again. Some village homes are built right out of the ruins and old blends with the new. An old woman on the roof of a stone cottage that seemed from another time adjusted her satellite dish after the storm cut power to the village. Along the spine of the hill beyond the acropolis there were about 20 Lycian funeral monuments. We were in another part of the Lycian civilization south of the region where we did our hike. Until sunset, we wandered the hillside among the funeral monuments and through the acropolis alone except for two herders and their goats.

We considered signing up for a kayak tour of the sunken city, but then we discovered the pension had two kayaks that we borrowed for the day. We traveled up the coast and discovered on our own a whole ancient world. It was incredible. Stone staircases descending from the shore into the water or rising straight out of the water like steps to nowhere. The ancient city sunk about two meters as the result of an earthquake a couple hundred years B.C. We kayaked into the three-sided remains of rooms and looked out windows that used to be much higher above sea level. This was another place where we could picture and imagine a long ago village living by the sea. We could see the homes, staircases and walkways and imagining the people came easily. We stopped for a swim and snack on a pier next to an old church, not a mosque. Christianity has been here longer than Islam, from soon after Christ until the 15th century.

Yasin took Katrine and the Kirkpatricks on a sunset cruise across the bay to see more of the ruins. Looking under the water we could see the entire break wall of an ancient port as we cruised along the far shore. On the way back Yasin caught a small tuna. The tuna flopped in the bottom of the boat all the way back. Colin gave us continual updates, “It’s still moving. It’s not dead yet.” We ate dinner at the pension. Like the previous night, we went to the cooler and picked our entrées. There was the tuna from our boat ride in the cooler. Liam wanted nothing else for dinner. He had the tuna and ate the whole thing! Katrine ate dinner with us and shared her calamari with the boys. They had had calamari for lunch the day before and decided that is wasn’t so bad. Yasin’s wife and daughter spent the evening catching small fish off the end of the dock and throwing them to the dock cats. Carolyn had her first (and last) glass of raki, courtesy of Katrine.

Here are some photos from our time in Kekova/Simena/Kale.