Five easy minutes west of the main square in Kaş the road bends, the seating opens out on your left, and you understand at once why people talk about this place. Twenty-six rows of pale limestone curve up the hillside, and where the back wall of a stage ought to close the view there is nothing at all except the Mediterranean. Climb a few rows and sit down. That, after all, is what the building is for.
The theatre went up in the Hellenistic age, in the second century BC, paid for by a small port doing very well out of sea trade, and it was repaired later under Roman rule. It holds about four thousand people, which tells you something about how many lived here.
Almost every other ancient theatre closed its stage with a tall scene building, so that the audience sat looking at painted timber and marble; Antiphellos never gained one in permanent stone, and the omission has aged better than any architecture would have. The bowl simply opens onto water. Notice how little effort the builders wasted elsewhere, too.
They set the seating straight into a natural slope of dense grey platform limestone, which spared them the massive vaulted substructures a flat site would have demanded. The hill did most of the work, and the sea did the rest.
Now, look for four things from your seat. First, the horizon straight ahead, where the long low island of Kastellorizo lies, known here as Meis; on a clear evening you can pick out buildings on it. Second, the seating under your hands, worn to a shine, and among it the blocks reset by the restoration completed in 2008, cleaner-edged and squarer than their neighbours.
Third, the rock the rows are cut from, and then Meis again, because they are the same thing. The folded carbonate ridges of the Teke coast do not stop at the shoreline, and that island is the crest of the same partly submerged ridge you are sitting on. You are looking out across a valley that happens to be full of sea.
And fourth, the slope around the seats, where wild olive, carob and mastic grow, cistus and thyme flower in spring, sea squill sends up its pale spike in autumn, and yellow-legged gulls ride the updraught off the point.
The real wonder of this place is that it is here at all. Along most of this coast ancient buildings were taken apart piece by piece for houses, field walls and lime kilns, and a theatre was simply a quarry with the stone already cut to size. This one was left alone.
When European travellers came through in the 1830s and 1840s and sat where you are sitting, sketchbooks on their knees, they found the shell remarkably whole, and it is very nearly as whole today. The restoration put displaced blocks back where they belonged, and the bowl is used again for occasional open-air events, so on a summer night you may arrive expecting silence and find music instead.
Take the short signed climb up the hillside behind before you go. A Doric rock tomb waits there, and around it runs a frieze of small female figures holding hands. They are read as a ritual round-dance, performed for whoever was laid inside, and the dance has no beginning carved into it and no end. More than two thousand years on, they have still not finished the tune.
You came into Kaş on the stage down from Kalkan, and the Way carries on out of town along the coast when you are ready. Tonight the plan is simple and hard to improve on. Bring a picnic, take a seat high in the rows an hour before sunset, and watch the sun go down the middle of your own view, with nothing whatever in the way where the scenery should be. Walk safe.
