A prosperous naval city, Phaselis

The poet says, when you miss the sea, turn your head to the sky because sometimes the sky is like the sea. There are so many encounters with the turquoise blue on the Lycian roads that we do not need to turn our heads up, we live our love for the sea to the fullest.

We realize why the ancient Lycians were called the people of the land of light in every bay where pines are accompanied by dense shadows. Those are the places that live the tango of blue with green. We passed by the indigo blue coves of the untouched Mediterranean, sometimes we went down the paths to the beach, and sometimes we looked down from the hills covered by trees for 30 km.

Olympos beach, which is named after this majestic mountain, which extends just below the 2300 mt Tahtalı mountain with its current name. How dazzling the yellow beaches illuminated by the charming Mediterranean sun. The path that will take us to Phaselis starts following this beach. Do not be fooled by the crowdedness of the beach in summer, because this is also a caretta caretta nest, maybe you can have a chance to meet one. The fire, whose kindling never goes out, still continues to illuminate there, 250 mt away from Cirali. Since Prometheus, who overpowered Zeus with his mind, lit it.

Our Lycian route started at Olympos beach, the playground of pirates and sailors, it seems as if we were drunk with blue and green until Tekirova on these shores. Entering from the tourism office on the coast, we finally came to Phaselis, a 2700-year-old rich and magnificent seafaring city with 3 natural ports. On the shore of the deep blue sea, under the shade of thousands of years old pine trees, Phaselis welcomed us as it was a guest in Alexander the Great's great advance from Macedonia to the East in 333 BC. There is a pine scent and an ancient splendor here. It is the most important trade center of the eastern Mediterranean, where perfume is made from the lily of Phaselis, oil is extracted from its roses and traded.

This sheltered port of the Eastern Mediterranean, where pirates once roamed, became the castle of a pirate of Anatolian origin named Zenikhetes, who defied the Roman empire and declared him the king of Olympos. Here is such a beautiful bay! In the clear blue of the Mediterranean, you will witness both history and nature by swimming between the piers, whose stones of thousands of years are still visible above and below the water, on both sides of the port, just like in Kekova. When I saw gulets and tirhandil ships in the open, passing through the shadows of the trees on the shore and passing by the historical aqueducts, I dreamed of barges with oars and sails, which means beans, from which Phaselis is named. Rose oils and perfumes made from lilies, whose fame spread as far as Nepal, thanks to the ships that traders usually carried their cargoes of wine, olive oil, timber to Egypt.