Heraclea under Latmos
Lakeside ruins in rustic village
Until a few decades ago, many of Turkey’s ancient cities were home to communities of subsistence farmers drawn to the same sites as their forebears – and no doubt grateful for the ready supply of recyclable masonry there. As the bureaucratic tendency to tidy kicked in, however, residents at sites like Aphrodisias and Labraunda were increasingly viewed as trespassers on the natıon’s cultural inheritance; the museum service forcibly removed them to purpose-built settlements nearby. At the walled city of Hellenistic-era Heraclea, however, the villagers of Kapıkırı have been left to continue their tenancy of these myth-haunted lakeside ruins to delightfully picturesque effect.
The simple cottages and pansiyons of these farmers and fishing folk stand amid the ruins of bathhouses and the council chamber where sections of fluted columns serve as garden tables or, as I once noted with delight, as trusted bootjack to an arthritic villager. The old agora was until recently the school playground, and the present function of the exceptional city walls, with many of the posterns and watchtowers intact, is to fence in grazing cattle and horses. Temples and later Byzantine structures look out over shore graves to the lake where fortified monasteries moulder down on their islands. There are more monasteries hidden amid the folds of the adjacent Mount Latmos, setting of mythical shepherd Endymion’s seduction by the moon goddess, where the walls of fantastically shaped caverns are covered with prehistoric paintings. Eski Latmos, the fascinating site of the original Carian city, lies a little to the east of Heraclea, though local guidance is required to find it. These are deceptive landscapes, with very little in the way of informative signage; not that anybody who’s gone out of their way to reach this magical place is likely to be relying on it.
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