Walk up Uzun Çarşı from the harbour square and the lane does something no planner alive would permit. It runs between whitewashed shopfronts hung with bougainvillea and lamps, and then it stops at a tomb. Shops on either side, scooters threading past, and there in the middle of everything a complete Lycian sarcophagus on a tall plinth, roughly twenty-four centuries old and entirely at home.
What stands here is a three-tier monument of a kind reserved for the leading families of the fourth century BC. Below your eye level, cut into the bedrock of the street, lies the original burial chamber. Above that sits the plinth. And on top of that, lifted into position by people with ropes, timber and considerable nerve, rests the great lidded chest itself.
Each of those pieces is a single block of stone, and that is the quiet condition behind the whole Lycian sarcophagus tradition. The platform limestones of this coast lie in beds thick enough to yield flawless monoliths weighing several tonnes, so a family could order a tomb carved out of one piece rather than assembled from many.
Salt air has since given the surfaces a tough grey weathering crust, which is exactly why carving this fine has survived in the middle of an open street.
Now, look for four things. First, the lid, which is the giveaway. It curves up to a ridge in the ogival profile the Lycians made their own, a shape you will start seeing on hillsides for the rest of this trail. Second, the four lion heads projecting from it, one at each corner. In Lycian funerary art the lion stands guard over the dead, and these four have been on duty a very long time.
Third, the panel below, where an inscription runs in the Lycian script. Read it if you can. Nobody else has. And fourth, look down at the rock-cut chamber beneath the plinth, then up at the eaves around you, where collared doves and house sparrows nest and geckos come out to hunt the lit stonework after dark. Jasmine and potted citrus stand in the doorways, and in summer swallows and swifts fill the narrow slot of sky above the lane.
Lycian can be pronounced but not fully read. It is an Anatolian language related to Hittite and Luwian, and nineteenth-century antiquarians copied this epitaph into the first great collections of the language, where it has sat ever since, sounded out and not understood. So the tomb keeps the name of its occupant to itself, which is a rather magnificent way of losing an argument with time.
The survival is the other marvel. Hundreds of comparable sarcophagi along this coast were broken up for building stone, their lids split, their chests reused as troughs and lintels. This one stood at the head of a street in continuous use since Roman times, and when Ottoman-era Andifli grew into the lanes you are standing in, the town built round it rather than over it. Somebody, in every single generation, decided that it should stay.
The name is the town's own. It is called the King's Tomb, and the story goes that a king lies inside, though nothing legible on the stone says so and nobody can prove it. The title is affectionate rather than historical. Given that the lions have guarded this man for twenty-four centuries without ever being told who he was, promoting him seems only fair.
You came into Kaş on the stage down from Kalkan, and the Way climbs out over dry hillsides when you leave. Before that, walk the ten minutes west to the sea-facing theatre and let the sun go down over the water, then come back up this lane after dark, when the shops have shut and the lions are lit against a deep blue sky. Enjoy them. Walk safe.
