The climb up from the crags takes less than an hour, and the moment the pines close over you, the chatter of the climbers falls away behind. Keep going until the ground levels out, and then start noticing that the boulders around you are far too square. There are walls in these woods. There are baths, and cisterns, and an apse curving up out of the leaf litter. This is Trebenna, an entire city hidden in the forest above Geyikbayırı, never excavated, quietly holding its shape under the needles.
Nothing you can see here is older than the Hellenistic age, and Trebenna's real flowering came under Rome. Its position explains almost everything about it. This is border country, the seam where Lycian administration met Pamphylian, an in-between place that mattered to both sides and belonged wholly to neither.
An inscription records that in the years 278 and 279 of our era the town was granted colonial status under Terentius Marcianus, governor of Lycia and Pamphylia, a promotion in rank that a small hill city would have talked about for a generation.
Byzantium later counted this ground to Pamphylia, and people stayed on these slopes from the fifth century through to the twelfth, scattering churches and monastic buildings among the terraces. Surveys led by Nevzat Çevik documented the whole of it around the turn of the millennium, and still nobody has put a trowel into its heart.
Now, look for four things while you wander. First, the walls. Find a line of masonry and simply follow it, because the circuit runs right through the trees, and once your eye is in, the rest of the town assembles itself around you. Second, the tumbled vaults of the Roman baths, and beside them the mouths of cisterns cut to catch every drop of winter rain on a hilltop that has no other water.
Third, on the high ground, the early Byzantine basilica, its apse still curving out of the leaf litter with pine needles gathered in the bowl of it. And fourth, on the slopes below, the rock-cut tombs and the sarcophagi, some with their heavy lids shoved aside long ago.
Then look for something much smaller and easier to miss. Among the stones lie rough little steles carved with a rider on horseback, carrying a club. That is Kakasbos, a horseman god the Greek pantheon never quite managed to absorb. He was honoured all across these hills by farmers and herders who could not afford a temple and did not seem to want one, and who cut their own modest stones instead.
Emperors came and went below, the great sanctuaries of the coast rose and fell, and up here a man with a club on a horse went on receiving thanks for a good year. It is a stubborn mountain faith, and it outlasted a great many grander ones.
Take your time on the ground itself, because the acropolis is uneven woodland strewn with loose blocks, and roots and half-buried masonry catch at the boot. Around you it is red pine, kermes oak and strawberry tree, with cyclamen and orchids opening on the terraces in spring.
Crag martins and blue rock thrushes nest on the limestone below, kestrels and buzzards ride the canyon rim, and in the damp karst of these hills lives the Lycian salamander, Lyciasalamandra antalyana, found in this corner of Anatolia and almost nowhere else.
Before you go down, look at the crags themselves, that steep grey and orange limestone hung with curtains and pillars of calcite, left behind where lime-charged water seeps down the faces. It is classic karst of the Beydağları foothills, and it is exactly what made Geyikbayırı famous among climbers. Ancient masonry above, modern ropes below, one band of stone serving both. Stay for the late light if you can, then go gently back down through the pines, and on east towards Antalya. Walk safe.
