In mountain villages spangled with poppies and wildflowers, women in baggy şalvar trousers brought me goat cheese, fresh honey and gozleme flatbread, washed down with glasses of tea. During the hottest hours I plunged into the sea, sheltered in forested canyons or stretched out in thyme-scented groves of oak, wild olive and dogwood. After dusk, a thick silence enveloped the land, and my campfire trembled beneath the whispering pines, as if urging me to remember the people who built these roads.
Indeed, on the Lycian Way, memory is such a pervasive presence that you walk, rest and sleep in the company of phantoms. For despite its dramatic beauty, this is a land of ghosts. In The Lycian Shore, an account of a journey along the peninsula by sea in the 1950s, the explorer Freya Stark called it “the most haunted coast in the world”. Empty tombs lie in every thicket and grove, like mute envoys sent down from a vanished embassy.
An ostentatious part of Lycia’s urban fabric, tombs were an expression of the central role of ancestor worship and the afterlife. Strangest of all were the tower-like pillar tombs found in the ruins of Xanthos, capital of Lycia under the Persians. The Lycian Way diverts inland to the site, which sits on a rocky outcrop surrounded by greenhouses and orange plantations. Two pillar tombs dominate the acropolis: the Harpy Tomb, adorned with reliefs of female winged figures; and the Xanthian Obelisk, a giant stele covered in Lycian script that has not yet been fully deciphered.
Xanthos’ greatest pillar tomb, the Tomb of Payava, with its bas-reliefs and Lycian inscriptions, was removed in 1841 by British archaeologist Sir Charles Fellows, who carted off all he could to London on the HMS Beacon. Today the tomb stands in the British Museum, alongside the original friezes from the Harpy Tomb, and the Nereid Monument, a spectacular sculptured tomb in the form of a Greek temple.