The climb has already told you most of what you need to know. Whether you came up the old zigzag from Kaş or strolled across the plateau from Çukurbağ, you are standing on a ridge at around seven hundred metres with the whole coast laid out beneath you, and the town that put you in this state is a white smudge far below. The Greeks called this place Phellos, which means stony ground. After that ascent, you will consider the name fair comment.
The Lycians themselves knew it as Wehñti, and they were here early. Pottery shows people living on this ridge from the seventh century BC, and by about 500 BC the city had entered written history in the pages of Hecataeus, ahead of almost every one of its neighbours.
Through the dynastic fifth and fourth centuries Phellos struck its own coinage and controlled the country between the Xanthos valley and Myra, one of the four great settlements of archaic Lycia, at times under rulers from the greater houses. Understand what that means for the view in front of you.
All of this, the coast, the islands, the valleys behind your shoulder, was once administered from a stony ridge with no harbour and no river, by people who chose height over water and were right about it for centuries.
Now, look for four things along the ridge. First, the house tombs, which are the treasure of Phellos. They are double-fronted, and carved with shields, with sphinxes, with lions, the sort of decoration that announced a family with money and connections in a place where everyone could see your front door from a very long way off. Second, at the western burial complex, the bull.
It stands out of the rock in bas-relief, over life size, in a style that speaks clearly of Persian influence, and scholars read it as the marker of a hero-shrine. Third, the small things, easily walked past: scattered Lycian inscriptions on the stones, and a patch of surviving mosaic floor among the ruins. And fourth, the bare rock itself, fluted and furrowed into sharp ridges underfoot.
That pattern is karren, etched into Lycian limestone by rain over a very long time, and it is the same stone, quietly dissolving, that the tomb carvers were cutting.
Then geography turned on the city. In the Hellenistic period the little harbour town below, Antiphellos, which means simply the place opposite Phellos, grew rich on sea trade, and the traffic reversed. Money went downhill. People followed the money.
The mountain city that had given the harbour its name dwindled into a village, remembered mainly in Byzantine church lists, while the place opposite Phellos became the town you can see spread around its bays. Nobody up here decided anything. The sea became more useful than the summit, and a whole city drained away down its own approach path.
About that bull. In Anatolian tradition the bull is the emblem and the mount of the weather god, the power that decides whether mountains like these give you rain or ruin, and the highest ground was the sensible place to put the question to him. Whoever was honoured at that shrine was given the god's own animal to stand over him, and given it at over life size. Stand up here when the cloud comes in off the sea and you will see the sense of the arrangement.
From here the Way drops back towards the coast and runs on to Limanağzı. Save something for that descent. On the hairpin path down towards Kaş there is a moment when the ground falls away and the town, the peninsula and the islands all appear at once beneath you, and it is one of the finest reveals on this whole section of the trail. Take those stones slowly, and enjoy every step of it. Walk safe.
