Stop here. Put the pack down and let your breathing come back, because you have earned this one. There is nothing to hear but wind moving through the conifers, and that is the whole point of the place. In the clearing ahead, one great arched wall stands entirely alone at around eight hundred and sixty metres on the flank of Alaca Dağ. Around its feet lie carved capitals in the grass. This was a church of the Archangel Gabriel, and today it is almost certainly yours alone.
Sit down among the stones before you start looking at them. This was a Byzantine basilica, built in the sixth century, in the age of Justinian, when a dense monastic landscape spread right across the Lycian uplands.
It was tied to the Holy Sion monastery and fed by the pilgrim traffic moving through Myra far below, and when the Arab conquests made the coast unsafe, mountain sanctuaries like this one mattered more rather than less.
An inscription records a restoration in the early ninth century, during the age of the iconoclast emperors, when the empire was arguing fiercely with itself about whether holy images should be painted at all. Then settlement drained out of the high valleys. For centuries, shepherds had the ruin entirely to themselves, until nineteenth-century surveyors came looking, and then, much later, walkers like you.
Now, look for three things while you rest. First, the arch itself, one span of masonry left standing out of a whole building, holding its shape against the sky without any help from anybody. Do not climb on it. The masonry is genuinely unstable, and it has held its shape for a very long time without anyone's help.
Second, the ground at its feet, where the rest of the church lies scattered: capitals, lintels and fragments of the chancel screen that once divided the congregation from the altar, carved with care by people who hauled every block up here. Third, the forest around the clearing. This is the Alaca Dağ nature reserve, juniper and old conifer with wild pear and hawthorn filling the gaps.
Crocus and cyclamen come up through the leaf litter in spring, jays clatter between the trees, and Krüper's nuthatches work the canopy over your head.
The most vivid thing known about this clearing comes from the Life of Nicholas of Sion, the sixth-century Lycian abbot whose deeds were later folded into the legend of Santa Claus. The text records his visit to the shrine of Gabriel at Karkabo, which is identified with this valley, and it says what happened when he arrived. Oxen were sacrificed.
Meat, bread and wine were shared out among the mountain villagers who had gathered to meet him. Read that again where you are sitting. It is an old Lycian feast, animals offered and the whole community fed, carried on almost unchanged under a new faith and a new name. The hills kept their customs and simply changed the dedication.
Look at the ground and you will see why nobody farmed up here. This is high karst, Mesozoic limestone weathering into thin, stony, well-drained soil that juniper and conifer tolerate far better than any crop could.
Rain vanishes into fissures and dolines and re-emerges far downslope, which is why the upper valleys run dry by late summer, and why a congregation on this mountain was always a deliberate choice rather than a convenient one.
May, June, September and October are the kind months up here. When your legs are ready, the inland stage carries on through Belören and down towards Finike, losing all this height again. Take the silence while you have it, because you will not find it that easily lower down. Walk safe.
