Gemiler
Byzantine ruins on cult island of St Nicholas
The back road out of Kaya passes the hamlet of Kınalı before winding through pine forest to a glittering bay fronted by a few restaurants and rickety wooden jetties, with gulets and sometimes noisy day boats anchored across it during the season. The restaurants being expensive and the beach unexceptional, the single outstanding reason for visiting this bay, whether by road or sea, is the high-spined and wooded island which rises there. One fee is payable at the entrance to the village; another to whoever might be persuaded to ferry you across. The easier approach is from your gulet where the only fee payable is at the site entrance by the island’s landing stage. Beware that between midday and teatime this is a haunt of the music-pumping pirate boats…
This is the island of St Nicholas, as it was known in the almanacs of medieval Italian sailors, a monastic complex dating from the fifth century and dedicated to the local bishop saint otherwise known as Santa Claus (an epic story of posthumous opportunism which I detail in my Santa: A Life).
Despite excavations by Japanese archaeologists, very little is known of this extraordinary place, though a sharp eye soon advises visitors that the island must have been rich in two particular commodities: sanctity and fresh water.
The path up from the landing point, where those noisy day boats moor and the ticket-seller sits, passes a series of ruined churches, one of them bearing the faintest of frescoed references to St Nicholas. Follow the path for a few minutes to arrive a truly enormous roofless cistern where the island’s winter rains were once collected; a snorkel along this shore’s submerged quayside reveals the remains of the subsidiary tanks, complete with terracotta piping, which this cistern once fed. Continue to reach an extraordinary cloistered processional way which descends towards the far end of the island and rises towards the summit, site of the settlement’s major church. The arcade appears unique, though it surely performed an anticipatory, drum-roll function; it may well be that the island, a draw for pilgrim traffic during the early Byzantine centuries, maintained in the summit church some cherished relics of the holy Nicholas – bones, perhaps, or articles of clothing – bequeathed or otherwise secured from his original shrine at Demre/Myra east along the coast. The church is home to some wonderful mosaics though they are only glimpsed beneath the dirt. From the summit there are magnificent views down the cliff-bound coast.
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