The path up from Yavu is steep and takes the best part of an hour, and then the ground levels and you step into something genuinely strange. Ogival tomb lids rise out of the scrub in every direction, near and far, ridge after ridge of them. Close to four hundred Lycian sarcophagi stand on this plateau, more than at any other city in Lycia. You are at seven hundred and fifty metres, on a hilltop that is a graveyard with a town attached.
Cyaneae was the second city of central Lycia, after Myra alone. Settlement began here in the fifth century BC, when Kyaneai was one of several dynastic seats in the Yavu highlands, and by early Hellenistic times it had become the administrative centre for the whole district. Nearly all of the famous tombs, though, are later than that.
They were cut during the long Roman imperial peace, which is exactly what a provincial town looks like when three centuries pass without a disaster: everyone who can afford stone spends it on the family name. A bishopric survived here well into the Byzantine period, and then, in the early Middle Ages, the city was given up. It was not destroyed and it was not buried. The people went down towards the coast, and the scrub came up.
Now, look for four things, and accept in advance that finding them will take a while. First, the sarcophagi themselves, looked at rather than walked past. Many carry detailed relief carving, and the range of workmanship, some of it superb and some of it frankly ordinary, tells you how long and how comfortably this place prospered.
Second, the theatre, half lost among the kermes oak, its rows still traceable through the branches. Third, west of the theatre, the Roman baths and, remarkably for a hill town, a library. And fourth, the edges of things: Byzantine church walls standing among the stones, and the city defences running round the rim of the plateau. Notice as you go what is not here.
No stream, no spring, no valley floor, only closed soil-floored hollows in fissured limestone where the rain goes straight down and vanishes.
The quarry, the workshop and the cemetery were all one hill, and that is the whole explanation for the extravagance around you. This plateau is a block of Mesozoic carbonates lifted between the coast and the inland valleys, and its limestone beds are thick, sound and easily worked, so a family that wanted a monolithic tomb had nothing to import and nothing to haul up the mountain.
They commissioned it from the ground they were standing on. Then, having built the densest necropolis in Lycia, the city walked away and left it. A team from Tübingen University under Frank Kolb surveyed the site minutely between 1989 and 2001, mapping it in extraordinary detail, and yet not a spade has been put to it. What you are looking at is exactly what the centuries left.
The name may come from kyaneos, the Greek word for dark blue. The better story is the one Pausanias tells. Cyaneae held an oracle of Apollo Thyrxeus, and its method was disarmingly simple: whoever gazed into the sacred spring saw whatever they wished to behold. Consider how much of prophecy that explains, and how little supervision it required.
From here the Way runs on down towards the coast, on the stage between Limanağzı and Aperlae. Stay while the light is still low if you can, when the massed lids throw their shadows across the scrub and the sea shows as a distant band to the south. Then take one long look back at the graveyard with a town attached, and go. Walk safe.
