The ancient lost city of Tlos:READY TO play Indiana Jones? You can in Tlos, in southwest Turkey. This is an impressive Lycian and Roman city, lost then rediscovered with huge excitement by Victorian explorers. On the way into the mountains to visit, stop to explore the Lycian tombs cut into the rockface, pillared temples and sarcophagi built like mini stone houses.
Climb the hill to see the fortress of Bloody Chief Ali, a notoriously nasty warlord from Ottoman times. The winding path looks steep but it’s not difficult to get to the top, although if you’re looking for riches they’re long gone. The real treasure here must be the generous panorama from the fort over the Xanthos valley, the ruined city, fertile fields and orchards providing shade for goats.
There are a handful of low-key restaurants here where you should stop to get a welcome, cold drink and lunch on freshly-caught trout, cooked in pomegranate juice.
Walk some more along the road and you’ll see the seats of a crumbling stadium and the remains of a gymnasium, a market hall and two different baths, all the requirements for a good Roman city. But the highlight for me was the amphitheatre, with rows of seats and fallen pillars scattered about like Lego. Search through the undergrowth to find inscriptions on the seats and beautiful, decorative carvings that in Ireland would be in glass cases.
Tlos can be visited as a day trip from Fetiye and is sometimes included in tours to the wonderful Saklikent Gorge. We stayed instead for a few nights nearby, in a lovely mountain lodge in Yaka village, where the pace of life is slower than on the coast.
And if you time it right, you can have the amphitheatre to yourself, as we did. Then pick your memorised text, stand centre stage and let rip.
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