You will probably smell the tea before you see the castle, and after the climb you have just done, that is the right order. Gedelme sits on a green shelf of the plateau at around seven hundred metres, and the village çay houses spread their chairs beneath a plane tree of frankly unreasonable size. Order something. Sit down.
Then look up at the walls on the knoll beside you, and at the tree above your head, because those two things belong together more closely than you would think.
The castle is Byzantine, ninth century in the form you can see, and its curtain walls still stand to a good height. Its name gives away its purpose. Gedelme comes from kadrema, the Greek word for a grain store. This was never a grand fortress of war. It was a strongpoint that guarded harvests and the mountain road, and those were really the same job, because whoever held the grain held the pass.
It went up as part of Byzantium's long answer to the Arab sea raids that harried this coast from the seventh century onward. Garrisons and granaries pulled back from the open shore to defensible points inland, and Gedelme controlled the road climbing from the bay of Kemer up to the high plateaux. Its usefulness outlived the empire that built it. Turkmen herders of the Teke country drove their flocks past these walls season after season, and an Ottoman village took root beside them.
Now, look for three things without leaving your chair, or nearly. First, the walls themselves, never excavated and only lightly repaired, which means you are looking at a medieval outline rather than a restoration. Do not climb them. The stonework is old and loose in places, and there is nothing up there the view from below does not already give you.
Second, the springs and fountains of the village, shaded by walnut, mulberry and fig, with grey wagtails working the water. Third, near the castle, a deep cave opening in the limestone, a karst cavity dissolved along fractures in the rock. It is unlit, so admire the entrance and leave the dark to itself.
Now the tree. The monumental plane beside the walls is reckoned to be around two and a half thousand years old. Take a moment with that figure, because it is doing something remarkable. That tree was a seedling when Lycia still spoke its own language and cut its own tombs into the cliffs. It was already a giant when Byzantine masons arrived to build the fort beside it.
It was ancient when the first Turkmen flocks came through the pass. The garrison rested in this shade between duties. So did the herders. So do you, right now, with your boots off. There are not many places on this trail where the continuity is quite so literal, or quite so comfortable.
The same fissured limestone under the cave is the reason this village exists at all. Water stored underground feeds the springs and fountains that upland settlements here depend on, and not far away the pale Mesozoic carbonate meets the darker ophiolitic slices of the Antalya nappes, which is what gives the surrounding slopes their sudden changes of colour.
In the wet limestone of the gorge below lives the Lycian salamander known to science as Lyciasalamandra irfani, found nowhere in the world but that one canyon.
Fill your bottles at the fountains before you move, because the forest ahead is drier ground, and the stage down to Göynük is waiting whenever you are. The plateau stays cooler than the coast all summer, and winter can dust this pass with snow. But finish your tea unhurried first. The tree has been holding this shade for two and a half thousand years, and it can spare you another half hour. Walk safe.
