Look up. That is the whole instruction here, and very nearly the whole experience. Above the rooftops of the Kesikkapı quarter the limestone rises in one great sunlit face, and it is riddled with doorways. Temple fronts, house fronts, small square openings you would walk past forever if nobody pointed them out. A city of the dead hangs directly over a city of the living here, and the two have been neighbours for more than two thousand years.
This is the necropolis of Telmessos, cut in the fourth century BC, when the city prospered under Persian overlordship with strong Carian influence in its taste. The families who paid for these tombs wanted their dead housed the way they themselves were housed, so the masons copied the town below, doorway for doorway. That town is gone completely.
Not one Lycian house of timber survives anywhere on this coast, because Telmessos was never abandoned. It went on living as Anastasiopolis under Byzantium, then as Makri, and now as Fethiye, each rebuilding erasing the last. This cliff is the only portrait we have of ordinary Lycian architecture, and we have it because the dead were the one quarter of the city that nobody ever redeveloped. In the late 1830s European travellers began sketching these facades for astonished readers at home, Charles Fellows among the first.
Now, look for four things as you walk up towards the base. First, the storeys. Let your eye climb the face and you will find the tombs ranked one above another, the grandest highest, exactly the way a wealthy quarter arranges itself on a hillside. Second, the carpentry. Look for the projecting beam ends, the panelled doors, the ridged roofs that copy timber shingles course by course.
Every one of those details existed first in a wooden house on the slope beneath you. Third, the relief carving on several of the facades, which repays patience: warriors with shield and spear, scenes out of myth, and quiet domestic moments of a kind that rarely reach a monument at all. And fourth, the current residents.
Rock doves and crag martins nest inside the burial chambers, a blue rock thrush sings from the rock face, caper and fig grow straight out of the cliff, and on summer evenings swifts scythe along the warm air in front of the tombs.
One episode from the city's history has the shape of a play. Telmessos passed to Alexander in 334 and 333 BC, and later his officer Nearchus wanted it back. Nearchus did not besiege it. He asked leave to send a party of musicians in through the gates, and the request was granted, because a town at peace does not turn away a concert.
Armed men walked in among the players with their weapons packed among the instrument cases, and the city was taken from the inside. A place whose entire fame rested on reading the meaning of things had failed to read a band of musicians.
That fame was real, and it was not built on trade. It is said that no dream in this part of the world counted for much until Telmessos had ruled on it. Herodotus records that the seers of this modest harbour were consulted by kings from one end of the Mediterranean to the other, on dreams and on omens, which carried the city's name much further than its cargoes ever did. The families lying in these tombs are the families who gave those answers.
Before you go, look at street level too, where several smaller house-type tombs sit among ordinary walls, entirely unvisited. Then the Lycian Way begins its first stage here and climbs out of Fethiye towards Ovacık. Take one last look up at the doorways as you leave, and at the whole vanished town they remember. Walk safe.
