Somewhere on the path between Üçağız and Kapaklı, high above the glitter of the bay, you stop looking at ruins and start walking through them. It happens gradually. A field wall turns out to be finely dressed ancient stone. A doorframe stands complete, lintel and all, holding up nothing whatsoever. And then, among the olive trees, you notice the coffins. This is Istlada, and it is one of the quietest pleasures on the whole Way, precisely because nobody has ever tidied it into a site.
Most of what stands here was raised in Hellenistic and Roman times, when this hillside prospered as a farming community inside the orbit of Myra, the great city along the coast. Tomb inscriptions from the imperial centuries name citizens of Myra, though the village may well have run its own affairs before that.
On the ridge above, Hoyran spans a longer arc still, from the Lycian dynastic age right through into Byzantine times. Neither place has ever been excavated. And here is the lovely part: the reason so much masonry is still standing upright has nothing to do with archaeology. It is cultivation.
People have been quietly maintaining these terraces for as long as the stones have been here, and a wall that holds your soil in place tends to get repaired rather than robbed.
Now, look for four things as you walk the terraces. First, the houses. Walls still shoulder-high, doorframes squared and true, the ordinary domestic architecture of a working village. Second, the sarcophagi, some thirty of them, with the curved ogival lids that mark a Lycian grave, standing between olive trees that somebody is still harvesting this season.
Third, up on the ridge, the Hoyran mausoleum, cut back into the living rock, its arch banded with relief carving. Getting up there means a rough scramble, so weigh it against your legs and the hour. And fourth, the four inscriptions running across that mausoleum, written in Lycian, a member of the old Anatolian family of tongues that is still only partly understood. Four texts, sitting there being perfectly legible and completely mute.
The idea underneath this whole hillside is easy to miss, because it is everywhere at once. Here, the grave was built like the house. The same cut stone, the same craftsmanship, the same long view over the water. The dead were not sent away somewhere separate and out of sight. They were given a residence on the family's own slope and left facing the sea, among the trees that fed everybody.
Two thousand years later, nothing much has changed about the arrangement. Farmers still walk between the tombs to reach the olives, and the tombs do not seem to mind. Greet the people you meet, keep to the paths and leave the gates exactly as you found them, because this is somebody's orchard as well as somebody's cemetery.
Look down past the terraces to the Kekova roadstead, that extraordinary sheltered channel held behind a partly submerged limestone ridge lying just off a slowly settling coast. Underfoot is terraced karst, benches of grey Mesozoic limestone whose hollows trap pockets of red soil, and that soil is the only reason the olives have any footing at all.
Around you grow carob, mastic and wild pear, with cyclamen and anemone in the shade of fallen blocks each spring. Hoopoes flick through the groves and scops owls call across the slope on summer nights.
Low evening light is the moment here, when the lids glow and the sea goes pale beneath you. Come October, the whole hillside smells of the olive harvest. When you are ready, the path threads on through the tombs towards Kapaklı and eventually down to Andriake and Demre. Walk it slowly. It is all somebody's front garden. Walk safe.
