In mountain villages dotted with poppies and wildflowers, women in baggies salvar my pants brought me goat cheese, fresh honey and gozleme flatbread, washed down with glasses of tea. In the hottest hours, I dove into the sea, sheltered in wooded canyons or lay in groves of oaks, wild olive trees and thyme-scented dogwoods. After dusk, a thick silence enveloped the land and my campfire flickered beneath the whispering pines, as if urging me to remember the people who built these roads.
Indeed, on the Lycian Way, memory is such an omnipresent presence that we walk, rest and sleep in the company of ghosts. For despite its dramatic beauty, it is a land of ghosts. In The Lycian coast, an account of a sea voyage along the peninsula in the 1950s, explorer Freya Stark called it “the most haunted coast in the world.” Empty tombs lie in every grove and grove, like mute envoys sent from a vanished embassy.
An ostentatious element of the urban fabric of Lycia, the tombs were the expression of the central role of the cult of ancestors and the afterlife. Strangest of all were the tower-shaped pillar tombs found in the ruins of Xanthos, capital of Lycia under the Persians. The Lycian Way diverts inland to the site, located on a rocky outcrop surrounded by greenhouses and orange groves. Two pillared tombs dominate the acropolis: the tomb of the Harpy, decorated with reliefs of winged female figures; and the Xanthian Obelisk, a giant stele covered in Lycian writing that has not yet been fully deciphered.
The largest pillared tomb on Xanthos, the Tomb of Payava, with its bas-reliefs and Lycian inscriptions, was removed in 1841 by the British archaeologist Sir Charles Fellows, who transported everything he could to London on HMS Beacon. Today the tomb is in the British Museumalongside the original friezes from the Tomb of the Harpies and the Nereid Monumenta spectacular sculpted tomb in the shape of a Greek temple.
