There are no barriers here, no signboards worth the name and, on most days, nobody else at all. The path leaves the village of Kılıçlı and climbs a scrubby ridge between Kaş and Kekova, and somewhere on the way up you realise that the shapes among the spiny burnet are not boulders. They are tombs. Blunt stone pillars stand along the crest, a tower waits on the summit, and the sea glints away beyond all of it. This is Apollonia, and almost nobody comes.
The oldest monuments on this ridge belong to the Lycian dynastic age. Hellenistic masons later walled the acropolis and raised its tower, in an era when small towns had good reason to feel nervous, and Roman rule then brought a quiet provincial prosperity, remembered chiefly through tombs rather than temples.
Apollonia has never been excavated, and what you are walking through lies more or less as abandonment left it. The name honours Apollo, chief god of the Lycians.
The rock beneath is karstified limestone of the central Lycian coast, and it shaped everything that happened up here: rain falls straight through the fissures rather than running across the surface, so there is no stream on this hill, and the town always lived on winter rainfall stored in cisterns. Those pockets of red soil in the closed hollows below were the only arable ground in a very stony country.
Now, look for four things on this ridge. First, and rarest, the Lycian pillar tombs, standing up out of the scrub like blunt stone fingers, dating from around 500 before our era. This is the archaic Lycian idea of a grave: a burial chamber lifted into the air on a single monolithic shaft, so the dead sit above the living world rather than under it.
They are far scarcer than sarcophagi, and to meet them on an empty hillside is a considerable privilege. Second, the Hellenistic tower crowning the acropolis, with the circuit walls running away from it. Third, the tumbled seating of a theatre on the slope, easy to walk straight past until the curve of it catches your eye. And fourth, a Byzantine church among the scrub, so that a single walk carries you across roughly a thousand years of building.
This city was never a great power. Its strength was company. Apollonia belonged to a sympoliteia, a political union, with neighbouring Aperlae, Simena and Isinda, four small towns pooling their citizenship and their voice so that the wider affairs of Lycia could not simply be settled over their heads. It worked for a long time.
Occupation ran on into the sixth and seventh centuries of our era, and then Arab raiding from the sea made this whole coast unsafe, and the four towns could pool nothing that would help. The hill was given up. Nobody has needed it since, which is fourteen centuries of quiet, and you are standing in the middle of it.
And the older story, the one attached to the land itself. It is said that when the goddess Leto came south with her newborn twins and needed water for them, wolves, lykoi in Greek, went ahead of her and guided her to the river Xanthos. From her guides, the story goes, the whole country took the name Lycia. Believe it or not as you please. It is a pleasing thought on a stony ridge like this one.
Watch your feet on the way round, because sarcophagus lids sit at ankle height in the thorn, and the spiny burnet has strong opinions about bare legs. Late afternoon warms the pillar tombs beautifully, warblers scold from the thickets and tortoises grind slowly through the clearings. When you have had your fill, the coast path leads on towards half-sunken Aperlae, an hour south, and then to Üçağız. Leave the stones exactly as you found them. Nobody is watching this hill but you. Walk safe.
