The Lure of the Lycian Way
Jeremy Seal samples a four-day stretch of the magnficent 500-kilometre waymarked walk through southwest Turkey. tasteAnatolia, Summer 2007
We’re walking west, following a line of red and white paint daubs on trees and rocks, ancient walls and cisterns which pass among the rearing limestone crags of the Bey Mountains in southwest Turkey. The daubs, which stretch 500 kilometres between Antalya and Fethiye, are waymarks along Lykia Yolu, or the Lycian Way. This walkers’ path was created as recently as 1999 but nevertheless combines historical resonance, scenic beauty and local lore perhaps more captivatingly than any other walking trail on earth.
It takes the best part of a month to complete Turkey’s first long-distance trail. We are contenting ourselves with a sample section, tackling a four-day stretch at trail’s eastern end. It’s October (autumn and spring being the seasons for the Lycian Way where the contours are closely packed and the fresh water stops are limited. We set out from Kemer, a scruffy conglomeration of half-finished holiday villages, and we’re happy to retreat into a rising forest landscape of pine and smokebush, myrtle and wild pistachio. Pink cyclamens grow among fallen pine needles, and the open slopes have been slow-basted all summer in sage and thyme. Spearmint grows along the streams and where a river steps down a steep gorge, gathering in chilly pools, we cool off among egg-smooth boulders. We lunch on the picnic of classic Turkish staples we are carrying in our daysacks; bread and beyaz peynir (Turkish feta), beef tomatoes and black olives, followed by dried apricots and mulberries, and slabs of sesame-tasting helva.
The Lycian Way has achieved fabled status among walkers since it was created by the formidable Kate Clow, a resident of Antalya. Clow and her volunteer teams have cleared the scrub from – and painted the way ahead along - ancient routes including Roman roads and the mule tracks of pilgrims and miners, explorers and invaders, and the pathways of local shepherds and nomads droving their livestock between summer pastures in the mountains and their wintering quarters on the coastal plain. The route switches alluringly between uplands and coast, taking in the high yayla (pastures) and even an optional mountain summit before descending to shoreside villages and beaches such as the 20-kilometre turtle-nesting strand at Patara. The Lycian Way is particularly notable for the historical and mythical sites it takes in; major city ruins like Xanthos and Myra and lesser-known ones like Aperlae, not to mention the remarkable wealth of funerary monuments, particularly the stone sarcophagae of the ancient Lycians. The route is a testament to Turkey’s extraordinary walking potential which Clow has further tapped with the opening in 2004 of a second waymarked trail, St Paul’s, which heads inland east of Antalya along the saint’s missionary journey to the ruins at Antioch in Pisidia.
This is a demanding trail, one that only the toughest of experienced walkers would be advised to attempt unsupported. We’ve gone for all the support available; not only the services of Kate Clow, pick of the trail’s excellent roster of guides, but capable cook-cum-bus-driver Omer who reunites us with our luggage every evening at a range of wild camp sites and simple country pansiyons where we are to stay. Even so, there are no guarantees as to when we’ll next wash.
We trail into camp that first afternoon, smelling of sweat and oregano, to find Omer has pitched our tents against a picturesque backdrop of abandoned stone cottages and holm oaks embroidered with exuberant grape vines. We supplement our campfire dinner of pilic shish (barbecued chicken, with locally sourced oregano) by snagging high branches of ruby-red grapes. The hornets we have disturbed soon settle down again and allow us to get on with our pudding. Omer tidies away before settling down to make sense of an application form for his first-ever credit card. Turkey is clearly changing but in the still evening, from very far away, a muezzin calls from his minaret.
We pass on through these enchanted uplands after a breakfast of bread and cheese, honey and boiled eggs. Villagers are stacking firewood in the hamlet of Ovacik. Abandoned timber farm buildings have sunk to their knees, spilling the gourds formerly used as water carriers from their attics. Raised wooden platforms or divans, once villagers’ convivial meeting places, have been engulfed by scrub oak. In the path lies an iridescent green question mark, a snake, which disappears with a flick of its tail. We stop to swim with frogs in a roadside water tank before we descend to Gedelme where a convoy of tourist 4WDs is parked by the tea house. But all is quiet beyond the main road. The air smells of hay beneath the ruined castle and a local family have swept the lane to sun-dry their harvest, laying out a carpet of cracked wheat and sliced apples.
We climb all afternoon to the hamlet of Yayla Kuzdere. Our lodgings are a farmstead deep among quince and pomegranate trees where pieces of 2,000-year marble, chunks of capitol and acanthus frieze, protrude casually from the masonry walls. The elderly farmer’s wife, hands stained by walnuts, prepares our dinner of fasulye (beans) and biber dolma (peppers stuffed with rice). We take turns to wash in buckets. We share our simple dormitory quarters with each other, and with a curious goat who sniffs at us in the early hours. The night sky fills with moths and with a deep sense of well-being.
We breakfast early on black tea and sigara borek (crumbly white cheese and chives in cigarette-shaped rolls of deep-fried filo pastry) before setting off up the lower slopes of Tahtali, or Olympos Mountain. Soon we are among juniper trees which lightning storms have sheared, and great cedars where buntings flit. Up on Cukur Yayla, where we make camp, shepherd families are dismantling their summer quarters – rough shacks covered with plastic sheeting – and preparing to head for the valleys.
In the dawn, hunters are after rabbits on the stark slopes of Tahtali Mountain. We leave them far below to reach Tahtali’s 2,375-metre summit where the Turkish flag flutters. The views are sumptuous; seawards to the three antique harbours of Phaselis and inland to the green tide line of forest below the peak of Kizlar Sivrisi (Girls’ Needle). A descent through forests of pine brings us to Ulupinar where we lunch on grilled trout, rocket salad and chips at a simple riverside restaurant. The going feels easy now as we follow the path to Yanartas, or the Flaming Rock; a hillside where burning gases have issued since ancient times when the place was known as the Chimaera, home to the legendary fire-breathing dragon slain by Bellerophon.
We reach the Mediterranean at Cirali, a charmingly low-key village of pansiyon cabins, with hammocks slung in tended gardens. It is here that we will rest, wash and recover. We are tired. Even so, the way ahead tempts us. In the afternoon, I walk to the end of the beach and follow the waymarks inland along a river, the path lit by azure flashes of kingfishers. I pass beneath a canopy of laurel trees to find myself among the ruins – temples and theatres, tombs and aqueducts - of ancient Olympos; perhaps classical Turkey’s most evocative site and just another of the many draws along this unique walking trail.
FACTBOX
Operators offering guided holidays on the Lycian Way include: Exodus (020 8675 5550; www.exodus.co.uk) in the UK and Middle Earth Travel (00 90 384 271 2559; www.middleearthtravel.com) in Turkey.
For further information and for copies of the official guide to The Lycian Way by Kate Clow and Terry Richardson (£13.99), visit www.lycianway.com
Jeremy Seal samples a four-day stretch of the magnficent 500-kilometre waymarked walk through southwest Turkey. tasteAnatolia, Summer 2007
We’re walking west, following a line of red and white paint daubs on trees and rocks, ancient walls and cisterns which pass among the rearing limestone crags of the Bey Mountains in southwest Turkey. The daubs, which stretch 500 kilometres between Antalya and Fethiye, are waymarks along Lykia Yolu, or the Lycian Way. This walkers’ path was created as recently as 1999 but nevertheless combines historical resonance, scenic beauty and local lore perhaps more captivatingly than any other walking trail on earth.
It takes the best part of a month to complete Turkey’s first long-distance trail. We are contenting ourselves with a sample section, tackling a four-day stretch at trail’s eastern end. It’s October (autumn and spring being the seasons for the Lycian Way where the contours are closely packed and the fresh water stops are limited. We set out from Kemer, a scruffy conglomeration of half-finished holiday villages, and we’re happy to retreat into a rising forest landscape of pine and smokebush, myrtle and wild pistachio. Pink cyclamens grow among fallen pine needles, and the open slopes have been slow-basted all summer in sage and thyme. Spearmint grows along the streams and where a river steps down a steep gorge, gathering in chilly pools, we cool off among egg-smooth boulders. We lunch on the picnic of classic Turkish staples we are carrying in our daysacks; bread and beyaz peynir (Turkish feta), beef tomatoes and black olives, followed by dried apricots and mulberries, and slabs of sesame-tasting helva.
The Lycian Way has achieved fabled status among walkers since it was created by the formidable Kate Clow, a resident of Antalya. Clow and her volunteer teams have cleared the scrub from – and painted the way ahead along - ancient routes including Roman roads and the mule tracks of pilgrims and miners, explorers and invaders, and the pathways of local shepherds and nomads droving their livestock between summer pastures in the mountains and their wintering quarters on the coastal plain. The route switches alluringly between uplands and coast, taking in the high yayla (pastures) and even an optional mountain summit before descending to shoreside villages and beaches such as the 20-kilometre turtle-nesting strand at Patara. The Lycian Way is particularly notable for the historical and mythical sites it takes in; major city ruins like Xanthos and Myra and lesser-known ones like Aperlae, not to mention the remarkable wealth of funerary monuments, particularly the stone sarcophagae of the ancient Lycians. The route is a testament to Turkey’s extraordinary walking potential which Clow has further tapped with the opening in 2004 of a second waymarked trail, St Paul’s, which heads inland east of Antalya along the saint’s missionary journey to the ruins at Antioch in Pisidia.
This is a demanding trail, one that only the toughest of experienced walkers would be advised to attempt unsupported. We’ve gone for all the support available; not only the services of Kate Clow, pick of the trail’s excellent roster of guides, but capable cook-cum-bus-driver Omer who reunites us with our luggage every evening at a range of wild camp sites and simple country pansiyons where we are to stay. Even so, there are no guarantees as to when we’ll next wash.
We trail into camp that first afternoon, smelling of sweat and oregano, to find Omer has pitched our tents against a picturesque backdrop of abandoned stone cottages and holm oaks embroidered with exuberant grape vines. We supplement our campfire dinner of pilic shish (barbecued chicken, with locally sourced oregano) by snagging high branches of ruby-red grapes. The hornets we have disturbed soon settle down again and allow us to get on with our pudding. Omer tidies away before settling down to make sense of an application form for his first-ever credit card. Turkey is clearly changing but in the still evening, from very far away, a muezzin calls from his minaret.
We pass on through these enchanted uplands after a breakfast of bread and cheese, honey and boiled eggs. Villagers are stacking firewood in the hamlet of Ovacik. Abandoned timber farm buildings have sunk to their knees, spilling the gourds formerly used as water carriers from their attics. Raised wooden platforms or divans, once villagers’ convivial meeting places, have been engulfed by scrub oak. In the path lies an iridescent green question mark, a snake, which disappears with a flick of its tail. We stop to swim with frogs in a roadside water tank before we descend to Gedelme where a convoy of tourist 4WDs is parked by the tea house. But all is quiet beyond the main road. The air smells of hay beneath the ruined castle and a local family have swept the lane to sun-dry their harvest, laying out a carpet of cracked wheat and sliced apples.
We climb all afternoon to the hamlet of Yayla Kuzdere. Our lodgings are a farmstead deep among quince and pomegranate trees where pieces of 2,000-year marble, chunks of capitol and acanthus frieze, protrude casually from the masonry walls. The elderly farmer’s wife, hands stained by walnuts, prepares our dinner of fasulye (beans) and biber dolma (peppers stuffed with rice). We take turns to wash in buckets. We share our simple dormitory quarters with each other, and with a curious goat who sniffs at us in the early hours. The night sky fills with moths and with a deep sense of well-being.
We breakfast early on black tea and sigara borek (crumbly white cheese and chives in cigarette-shaped rolls of deep-fried filo pastry) before setting off up the lower slopes of Tahtali, or Olympos Mountain. Soon we are among juniper trees which lightning storms have sheared, and great cedars where buntings flit. Up on Cukur Yayla, where we make camp, shepherd families are dismantling their summer quarters – rough shacks covered with plastic sheeting – and preparing to head for the valleys.
In the dawn, hunters are after rabbits on the stark slopes of Tahtali Mountain. We leave them far below to reach Tahtali’s 2,375-metre summit where the Turkish flag flutters. The views are sumptuous; seawards to the three antique harbours of Phaselis and inland to the green tide line of forest below the peak of Kizlar Sivrisi (Girls’ Needle). A descent through forests of pine brings us to Ulupinar where we lunch on grilled trout, rocket salad and chips at a simple riverside restaurant. The going feels easy now as we follow the path to Yanartas, or the Flaming Rock; a hillside where burning gases have issued since ancient times when the place was known as the Chimaera, home to the legendary fire-breathing dragon slain by Bellerophon.
We reach the Mediterranean at Cirali, a charmingly low-key village of pansiyon cabins, with hammocks slung in tended gardens. It is here that we will rest, wash and recover. We are tired. Even so, the way ahead tempts us. In the afternoon, I walk to the end of the beach and follow the waymarks inland along a river, the path lit by azure flashes of kingfishers. I pass beneath a canopy of laurel trees to find myself among the ruins – temples and theatres, tombs and aqueducts - of ancient Olympos; perhaps classical Turkey’s most evocative site and just another of the many draws along this unique walking trail.
FACTBOX
Operators offering guided holidays on the Lycian Way include: Exodus (020 8675 5550; www.exodus.co.uk) in the UK and Middle Earth Travel (00 90 384 271 2559; www.middleearthtravel.com) in Turkey.
For further information and for copies of the official guide to The Lycian Way by Kate Clow and Terry Richardson (£13.99), visit www.lycianway.com
