Olympos Ancient City Tickets and Tours | GetExperience.com

Olympos is a Lycian city the forest took back. Ruins run along a stream bed between two ridges and stop at a pebble beach. Nothing here has been tidied up.

Who held it, and for how long

A city wall and a sarcophagus inscription date to the end of the fourth century BC.

• The League. A leading member of the Lycian League, striking League coins from late in the second century BC.
• Pirates. Zeniketes ran this coast from here until Servilius Vatia took the city about 76 BC; he burned himself rather than be taken.
• Rome and Byzantium. Expelled from the League, readmitted in the first century AD, later a bishopric.
• The end. Venetians, Genoese and Rhodians raised coastal forts here, and by the fifteenth century the city stood empty.

The site and the fire above it

An hour walks the ruins, and the pleasure is that laurel and fig have half swallowed them.

• The theatre. Set back from the stream, its seating mostly gone and its shape still plain.
• The temple portal. A carved marble doorway standing alone in the undergrowth, and the picture everyone takes.
• The Chimaera. Gas seeping through rock above the valley, alight at least two and a half thousand years, with five to twenty-five vents lit at once.

The Greeks put a fire-breathing monster here for a reason, and a sanctuary of Hephaistos stood beside the flames. The climb from the road takes twenty minutes. Go after dark or you see nothing.

Practical

• Two visits, one trip. The city is a daytime walk, the Chimaera an evening one, usually sold together with dinner between.
• Footwear and torch. The path up is unlit and stony, and phone light is not enough.
• The flames. Smaller than the photographs suggest, and best on a still, cool night.
• The valley. Wooden treehouse pensions have run it since the 1980s, and the Lycian Way passes through.
• Distances. Kemer is about forty minutes north, Antalya an hour and a half.