The end of certainty

Who needs a holiday?

Enki tied off to the shore at Sarsala, in Skopea Limani

The goat-track off our stern (photo taken from Enki in position above)

When the golden weather came to an end yesterday, I checked back in our ship's log to see when the first big southerly blow hit us last year. I know you won't believe this, the climate being manhandled into delinquency and everyone (including myself) certain that the seasons are all out of whack, but it was on exactly the same date - October 1.

Cloud rolling in from the west

No dodging this one

Autumn caught us off-guard last year. We were at Yesilkoy, just up the coast from Kas, anchored and tied off to shore. Same old same old - brilliant sunshine, flat water, next to no wind. But by early evening, something had shifted. There was weather on the way, as they say at sea. The wind was strengthening and we were on a lee shore, and with boats packed tightly around us. Thunder rumbled and lightning flickered across the mountaintops to the south. The sea rose very quickly and at 2 am we were frantically fending ourselves off the flanks of the neighbouring gulet. "You're dragging," the gulet captain had to tell us.  We'd taken a huge gust on the beam which had dislodged our hitherto unimpeachable Rocna anchor. That's how the summer finished last year. We learned important lessons about Turkish weather patterns and our anchor. Both hold firmly, until they don't.

The boys had great voices, and the mangal (charcoal barbecue)  smelled good too

Cleansing drops

We were better prepared for last night's light and sound show which was more remarkable for its stamina than its ferocious wind speeds, and the rain today....ah, we haven't seen solid rain like this since spring. The Mediterranean doesn't mess around as much with its seasonal mix as we do downunder. When it's summer, you get hot and dry. When winter is around the corner, you get rain and the temperature drops. Simple.

Before the storm, we had a few perfect days in the Gocek gulf, which is properly called Skopea Limani. It was all about the turtles, really. I've loved turtles since our first cruising season in Queensland. They make me smile when they pop their little old man's head out of the water and then flip their bottom up in the air and dive for cover. This year has been a vintage turtle year with regular turtle sightings from Enki and the kayak in anchorages around Gocek and Kas. But the best by far was when I swam with a turtle on the last day of the golden weather.

September 30 began as a marked day - I was thinking about the birth of my daughter 23 years ago, and the funeral of Robyn's mother Alison in Auckland that morning. I was missing my tribe, half a world away. I paddled my kayak along the beach with the olive grove, searching in the weedy shallows for turtles, then came back to the suntrap of our cockpit and read some more of The Swerve, Stephen Greenblatt's clever riff on the ripple effect of Lucretius's epic poem On the Nature of Things. At 3 pm, before the sun fell too low to see well underwater, I went for a last snorkel off the back of the boat. The fish in the gulf this year are more plentiful and varied than I remember them from last year. They're small, granted, and very few are daring in their colours, but they're delightful to float among.

I was swimming along, thinking about how I'd like a better mask (one which doesn't leak and which has magnifying glass), when I belatedly recognised the shape of a turtle's back right below me. A neck and flippers too. He was foraging on a rocky ledge down in the dusty blue, as placid as a cow in a field. I wasn't expecting him there, and he either didn't see me or my looming presence didn't frighten him. He was pushing his nose into the cracks and crevices (what do turtles eat?) and shifting small stones with his back flippers. When he'd done in one watery nook, he pushed on.  I followed him at a distance. I'm not sure how deep the water was, but even with my dodgy mask, I could keep him in sight as he mooched along, diving and then surfacing to exhale, and then diving again. I was mesmerized by the motion of his flippers, the front ones like angel's wings, the back ones like clever little legs.

We kept company for a bit, and after a while I got bolder, and possibly contravened good wildlife practice by getting close enough to touch (I didn't) his firm mustard-yellow under-belly which does, I must admit, look as though it would make very good eating (sorry, vegetarians, and no, I do not want to eat a turtle....).

Eventually, he decided it was time to sink - he stopped moving his flippers, and dropped like a stone down down into the deep deep blue until he disappeared. I was too cold to wait for him to come up again, but I'd had enough. My capacity for pleasure with turtles has peaked. For now.

"Pancakes, bread" - floating stall, mother and son

Yesterday, just before the wind came in, we sorted out the lines attaching us to the official orange buoy we're hanging off (the marine authority's preferred method of mooring in the very deep waters of this gulf). Then I paddled around to the stern and while I was tying off my kayak, Alex leant too far over the bow and put his back out. So we are back in THAT place, where the options we had in the moment before the back went "crack" are no longer options. We will hang off this buoy until he can function again, I'm guessing in five days.

Not again...the man is a glutton for pain

We will enjoy the autumn air which feels so soft and clean, rinsed out by the deluge, and know that whatever we do is gone before we've counted the moments.

The sun rises over Fethiye gulf (and below)

Sport for the gods

Dusk in the gulf of Volos, looking towards the Pelion range 

One of the few things I am indisputably better at than Alex is typing. It's a small matter but hey, sometimes it's useful. Touch typing makes thinking on a keyboard faster, but as a baseline you need 10 operational fingers.

Right now I have nine. One is out of play for a few weeks, sidelined by a bloody close encounter with 10mm galvanised steel anchor chain. You don't need to know more. Sympathy declined. It's a basic boating rule that even - or especially - in a tricky situation (which this was, in the infamously unreadable approach to the Khalkis bridge over the Evia channel), you keep your hands clear of the anchor and/or chain. I accept the blame and pain.

But we are in Greece where, prompted by the deeply suggestive Greek geography and language, snatches of remembered myth about the crowd on Mt  Olympus float readily to the surface of the mind, and I often find myself wondering if the various plot twists in Enki's summer two-hander are providing sufficient amusement for the gods... yet.

I am sitting with my right hand resting above my heart (thanks to the back-up medical team on Sea Cloud for their advice), and typing with one finger. Alex is now in charge of everything requiring two hands and contact with water. Surprisingly, that does leave a few things for me to do on the boat - I can still lower and raise the anchor with the foot-operated deck button, for example. Now I sense your confusion. So why did she need to have her hand near....as I said, no need to know too much. We have had a few problems this season with the fabulous new bow roller, and we will get it modified over the winter. Alex's back agrees.

Kkalkis bridge, looking from the north side

Perhaps there should be a teeshirt: I PASSED THROUGH KHALKIS. On paper the Evia Channel looks a doddle, the obvious route north or south in the summer when the prevailing meltemi wind is blowing dogs off chains (how many times have I heard that lately, and each time it makes me smile). The first I heard of the Khalkis bridge, which crosses the channel at the town of that name, was in Thasos, from a woman on a Swiss boat which was heading the same way. She said the bridge would be an "adventure". That was news to me.

Evia island. from the channel north of Khalkis

I'd wanted to go south via the Evia channel because I've been reading a book on and off for a year or more called Travelling Heroes, byBritish historian Robin Lane Fox. It's a bit dense, but the heroes in question are Greeks who lived on Evia in the 8th century BC and took their culture and gods as far west as Italy and as far east as Lebanon (using the modern names for these places). The two most important city-states of the seven on Evia were Khalkis and Eretria. I wanted to at least pass by these towns, knowing they were well beyond their prime, but still, the waterway and the mountains don't change over two or three millenia, do they?

Fishing village in O. Vathoudhi, gulf of Volos

Lighthouse on Aryironisis in the Trikeri channel

From Skopelos we headed west towards the gulf of Volos, and parked ourselves for a couple of days beneath the beautiful wooded slopes of the Trikeri peninsula. How strange it is to be sizing up an anchorage on the basis of depths and wind direction and to learn from the cruising guide that such and such a place which you have just decided to leave in your wake was where Achilles supposedly launched his fleet to set out for Troy ("the wind is blowing straight in from the south east, it may die, but there's better shelter a bit further on and we have time..."- so goes our standard pre-anchoring blether, with Achilles counting for nothing in this instance).

The gulf of Volos sits to the north of Evia, so we followed the wind down pretty much, and the sailing has been amongst the best so far, with relatively flat water and fine strong breezes.

Lazy sailing with reefed genoa and 7 knots is plenty fast

Then came Khalkis where we made a bit of hash of things, I ended up looking like a vampire, as Alex said, we were befriended by a big strong single-hander called Gene, originally from Odessa but now from Brooklyn, NYC,  and yes, it was an adventure, that bridge.

Rafted up to Lariella, and Capt Gene, on the quay at Khalkis

Freighter comes through open bridge from south

In brief, it's a sliding bridge 25 m wide, crossing a gap only 39 m wide between the island of Evia and the mainland. It opens once every 24 hours, sometimes less often, always at night, and only when the tide is slack. It seems to be a black art judging slack tide at Khalkis. The currents in the channel are strong and at Khalkis they run up to 7 knots and change direction at will. There is no tide chart and nobody will tell you how deep the water is at the quayside because it changes all the time. To go through by boat, you must be in Khalkis in time to register and pay the toll before 9 pm and then you must find somewhere safe to anchor or tie up your boat until you are called to go through. There's hardly anywhere that fits the description safe for a boat with Enki's draft of 2.5 m; luckily we met Gene and rafted up to Lariella. She was in 2.1 m at the quay but on her other side the depth was 3.5m, deep enough for us. The moon was full, and the water level dropped further, and bottomed at 3.2 m beneath Enki. We were called by the port authority at 3 am, went through at 3.45 am and were anchored again in the big shallow bay on the south side by 4.15 am.

Freighter goes south before us and yacht waits for quay berth

The Khalkis bridge the next morning from the south anchorage

The suspension bridge a little further south has air space galore

Should you ever be in Khalkis in summer on a Saturday night, you should know that they party hard right on the quay. When we let off our lines, we could barely hear what Gene was saying to us from a metre away.

Enki anchored off the beach in Eretria harbour

Now we are anchored off Eretria inside the ancient harbour that the travelling heroes built. It is Monday, and tomorrow the museum will be open. Must be open! Last night we sat in a restaurant next to the car ferries which come in and out every 20 minutes. The octopus was very good. My finger was expertly dressed by the in-house pharmacist, and life was, is, not dull.

Biding our time in Okluk

While we are still in Turkey, I am reading Alexander's Path, by the late Freya Stark, whose travel writing I have a crush on.

Her hero, Alexander the Great

The nomadic Miss Stark 

Miss Stark was a superb traveller, known as a kind of Freya of Arabia. She was also an impressive classical scholar. She came to Turkey in 1954, at the age of 61, to try to figure out exactly which route Alexander and his army marched when they left Halicarnassus (now Bodrum) to meet up with his commanders in  Phaeslis (south of Antalya) during an early military campaign.
She had a pretty hard time of it. Roads certainly weren't what they are now, nor was transport much improved since Alexander's time. She travelled by jeep where one was available, and by taxi (ditto), but often by packhorse or donkey - she rode well, and often much further than her guides wished to go. It goes without saying that a woman with an itinerary of her own making was not usual in Turkey at the time, and she was regularly thwarted by male intransigence. But she was philosophical, and an Englishwoman. "One of the chief blessings of travel," she wrote, "is that sameness is not its attraction; the pleasant and the unpleasant days are almost equally agreeable to remember, once they are over." If only I had more of Miss Stark's personal fortitude.

Enki at anchor in Okluk

The neighbourhood, looking south-west

Freya Stark has kept me company these past six days, and I do like company. Alex hasn't been up to it.  When he put his back out on Sunday morning, he hunkered down with his old familiar, mind-twisting pain, and it's only today, now that he no longer looks like a bent fork, that we're able to contemplate moving on from this anchorage.

It's been a fine place to be holed up, honestly, though you'd have to call Okluk a backwater. Miss Stark put it in the proper perspective for me: "A good traveller does not, I think, much mind the uninteresting places. He is there to be inside them, as a thread is inside the necklace it strings. The world, with unknown and unexpected variety, is part of his own Leisure; and this living participation is, I think, what separates the traveller and the tourist, who remains separate, as if he were at a theatre, and not himself a part of whatever the show may be."

The pier attached to Turgut's restaurant in Okluk

Speaking Turkish is a prerequisite for understanding the show in Okluk, or anywhere else. I don't have enough Turkish, but I do have a kayak which is a social ice-breaker. I met a Yorkshireman called John, who has spent three winters here on his boat Simone - he suffers from back pain too, and when he found out that Alex was crook, he came across with a bag of books. He gave us the rundown of Okluk's characters, who he'd invite on his boat, and who he'd close the door on. Small places are like that.
We asked him about the bay one around from here which is marked off-limits on the chart. Oh, he said, that's reserved for the use of the Turkish prime minister. It's got a permanent police guard. But the current PM doesn't use it much because his wife and daughters prefer the high life at Bodrum.
Thunder is banging around in the hills, and we'll be heading out soon to eat at Turgut's outdoor restaurant on the other side of the inlet. It's where the show goes on each evening in Okluk, and tonight we get to watch and learn.

The place to eat

One last word from Freya Stark though before I put her to bed. In 1952, she cruised with the British consul in Smyrna (now Izmir) and his wife along the Lycian coast in a small boat called Elfin. "No part of the world can be more beautiful than the western and southern coasts of Turkey", she declares in the opening sentence of Alexander's Path, so you know where she stands on the matter. But how well can you know a country when you travel by boat? I've often wondered, and she obviously did too. "A country looked at from the sea is like the sleeping Princess, the unknown," she writes. "From the land it is no longer enchanted, but varied and human, a foundation for friendship and living..." I tend to agree with her. We need to get ashore more this year.

Before we go to Istanbul

We're going to Istanbul tomorrow, and I'm as excited as a kid the night before Christmas.  I love meeting new cities, but especially the big ones, the ones to which all roads lead - and in Turkey, all roads lead to Istanbul.

I'm glad we're going to Istanbul when the days are short and cold. Over the past two or three months, my mind has been thoroughly stained by Orhan Pamuk's trance-like fiction and I'm now reading his memoir Istanbul. I refer to the map I have in my head of Pamuk's melancholy city when I flick through the Lonely Planet. "(Melancholy) does not just paralsye the inhabitants of Istanbul: it also gives them poetic license to be paralysed" he writes. Going in summer just wouldn't feel right, not just because of the crowds and the heat, but because summer is colourful, and the Istanbul I'm expecting is black and white.
I've read every book in English about Turkey that's come my way from Irfan Orga's classic memoir of an Ottoman childhood to Elif Shafak's chick lit, and of course the travel writers - Eric Newby, Jeremy Seal, Philip Glazebrook.  But I keep coming back to Pamuk.

This is my first ever visit to Istanbul, but not Alex's. He was there in the late 1970s. He hasn't been reading as I have, but he has his own memories to refer back to. Between us, in the seven days we've allowed ourselves to wander the town, we'll create new ones.

Before we leave for the Big Smoke, I want to slip in a few "real life" pictures from our provincial life. We wake to cooler temperatures now - Alex turns on the diesel-fired heater when he gets up. He feels the cold. Our Australian friend Kevin however is made of sturdier stuff. I spotted him shirtless this morning while we eating breakfast  - next time, I tell him, I'll be shooting with the telephoto lens.

Breakfast is distinctly autumnal. The superb stone fruit of summer is long gone, and I'm buying quinces, persimmon, oranges, pomegranate, grapefruit, bananas (from Ecuador).

Alex is out and about on his bike now. He's just called me from Anfora, one of his favourite chandleries. The solar panels he ordered through Anfora have arrived from Istanbul, and Omer, who owns the shop, has offered to deliver them to Ergun, the stainless steel fabricator, out in Saniye, the industrial area of Marmaris. Men like Omer and Ergun, Ramazan the electrician and Rashit the canvas-maker are Alex's new "friends". Omer, like quite a few Turks we meet here, is originally from Istanbul. He is impeccably polite and helpful, speaks manageable English and, it seems to me, enjoys Alex's regular company, albeit on a strictly commercial basis. They all do, I think.

From Anfora, he's going on to North Sails (the Marmaris branch). I'm not quite sure what he's up to there - they have a half-price offer on all new sails, valid until December 31. That'll be difficult for him to pass up.

We were going to wait until next season to replace our sails, which are the original ones from 2005 i.e. they've been around the world already, but perhaps he'll weaken. He's got a quote for a new genoa...
Our sails are in their sail loft already, awaiting washing, repair and storage for the winter. You can see that Alex is in his element here in Marmaris which, though it's a small town, is Turkey's yachting capital.

Rashit, who came to fit our new winter "tent" yesterday, told us that there were 100 yacht upholstery businesses in town, with ten in the immediate vicinity of the shop he runs with his wife and son. We were recommended to use Rasit by Ramazan, who also recommended Ergun. All these men speak good English which makes dealing with them so much more straightforward - though as we discovered in Sicily, you can get by with Google translate if you have to. But more importantly, we think they're intelligent, and so far, they have all done what they've promised to do. They keep in touch with us, and they come to the boat when they say they're going to. They could teach the tradies at Port Napoleon (with the exception of Markus, of course) a thing or five. The traumas of that yard still rankle.

Here are Alex and Rashit working out how to install the winter tent, made by Hallberg Rassy.

At 4 pm, when the job was finished to their satisfaction and the sun was sinking quickly, Rashit accepted our offer of an Efes (the local beer). "What a good idea," he said. We weren't sure if he drank, although when Alex had indicated to him that he could use our aft cabin to pray (it has a perfect prayer-sized rug), he declined. Ramazan the electrician, on the other hand, had accepted gratefully, and ducked away for a few minutes at noon and at 3 pm. There's no knowing what the muzzein's call to prayer means to individuals here. You can make assumptions.

Marmaris, on the surface, is a thoroughly Westernised town and even more so within the marina where last night Pineapple restaurant put on a special Thanksgiving menu last night - we'll be having Christmas dinner there, I'm sure. But this is an Islamic country, and even the most cursory reading of the on-line English version of the daily paper Hurriyet reveals huge anxiety and tension about Islamisation (ugly word, ugly prospect). How far will Erodogan, the PM, go in pushing the constitution away from Ataturk's vision of Turkey as a secular state? Everyone's talking about it. In coastal towns like Marmaris and Bodrum, Turks like those we are getting to know have a lot to lose if Turkey goes the way of Iran.

Time to dig a bit deeper

I'm in all sorts of trouble here. Far too much to show and tell. I'll imagine myself at primary school, standing in front of the class, legs trembling, with five minutes to do my talk. The teacher's at the back of the room, tapping her wristwatch...

Back to the wall of the best grave at Arykanda

This has been the week we started to get the hang of Turkey. Not so much modern Turkey, or the easy-going part of it we've come to know over the summer, but its previous incarnations which, now we've been here a while, seem increasingly important to learn something of.

Faces from Myra's past 

Demre's hothouses butt up against the ruins of  ancient Myra

I have a longstanding habit of finding my way into places through books.  Recently I've gone back to Orhan Pamuk, a monumental writer, and not one to underestimate his reader's intelligence. My Name is Red is set in 16th century Istanbul amongst a clique of miniaturist painters - he draws out of that esoteric brew the sharp dynamics which I am beginning to recognise as essentially of this country now called Turkey. Pamuk's books take for granted some knowledge of its glorious and inglorious history. I come up seriously short here.  Thankfully, Louis de Berniere's novel Birds Without Wings, which I mentioned in the previous post as being set in this part of Turkey (somewhere between Letoon and Fethiye, I'm guessing), assumes the reader is an ignoramus and for that reason alone it was enormously useful to read - actually, I couldn't put down my Kindle for several days.

Buried Byzantine church pillar at Olympos

Mosaic fragments in the bush at Olympos

I now have my Ottoman and my Byzantine empires better sorted; I understand a little more about the waves of Persians and Egyptians and Turks (people who came from Central Asia) which displaced the Greeks and Roman occupations on this coast and about why the tide is always out for the Armenians and the Kurds; I know more about how things stand now between Greeks and Turks (Cain and Abel, blood brothers) and about why the Turkish army and the inheritance of Mustafa Kemal 'Ataturk' has such political potency. But mostly, because of what I've read, I feel much more comfortable about being in Turkey as a non-Muslim (non-religious, to be exact). The people who've lived on this south-western region of Anatolia have never have been a homogenous lot. They're very used to rubbing along with 'infidels' and Franks, as the Ottomans used to call western Europeans.

Doorway in Kas

A Lycian king's lion tomb in Kas

Buying grapes and figs on the road in the hills behind Kas

A hundred years ago, before the brutal population exchange which accompanied the birth of the new Turkish state, the population of a town like Kas would have been a gritty mix of Turks (Muslims), Greeks (Christians), Armenians, Jews and drifters from various corners of the vast Ottoman empire. Everyone would have spoken Turkish. Occasionally people would have choked on each other's beliefs and ethnicities, but commerce then, as today, is a marvellous lubricant. I think the closest thing to being an Ottoman today is being American.

Today, Kas has a couple of mosques at least, but no churches I can see. Yet it is mellow, a live and let live kind of town, less indebted to the English tourist trade than its glitzy neighbour Kalkan, and yet open to persuasion. Perhaps this sophisticated new marina we're parked in, with blissfully few other boats around us, will change its character. I'd like to think not.

Texting at the base of the Lion Tomb

Backgammon passes the time in Kas

We came back to Kas a week ago, sporting yet another grievous injury to boating body parts. This time it was the Lewmar V3 windlass which had seized, terminally as we now know, as we were upping anchor in Kekova.  Thank God for electric winches is all I'll say, and spare you rest of the gory details - there have been too many of those already. The good news is that we've been able to buy a replacement in Turkey and it's here on the boat - and with luck, it'll be fitted by the end of the weekend.

While we were waiting for this (bigger V4) windlass to arrive from Istanbul, we did what we'd been planning to do anyway - hired a car to visit more Lycian ruins. Truly, you say, more ruins? Yes. More ruins. And not one site the same as another. All part of the Lycian League which I grow more and more fascinated by. Not just tombs, you see. So much more than tombs, in fact.

Before we set out on our travels through Lycia,  Alex been wondering how it was that he and Jan had missed it when they drove through Turkey nearly 40 years ago on their epic VW Kombi trip from London to Calcutta. "We were young, but we weren't totally uncultured," he said. As the days flipped by however, we realised that, with the possible exception of Myra, these Lycian sites in and beneath the Taurus mountains can't have been on the map back then. Locals would have always known about their ruins, and plundered from them, and perhaps a British explorer had passed that way a century before and plundered yet more and written a scholarly article or two for the Royal Whatever Society. But the money and the knowhow necessary to excavate these magnificent civic structures from the hundred of thousands of metres of silt and rubble under which they've been buried for two millenia has been available to the Turks only quite recently. Work at Patara, for example, didn't get going until the late 1980s, and at Olympos it was much later in about 2005.

Ruins at Olympos are scattered along the river leading to the sea

Roman temple lintel, Olympos

Olympos, despite the seductive name, is not really worth visiting yet. The ruins there are in their "natural" state, choked by vegetation, scattered, hard to piece together with the eye and far from being pieced together by the archeologists. The walk along the river is divine, but not so the seedy hippy strip which feeds into it. It's a long drive from Kas, and the best we could say for the effort we put in is that it was interesting to see the beginning of the excavation process - and then think of Ephesus, and of the treasures which many many decades of hard archeological labour have drawn forth from the earth.

Oops. The teacher is looking at her watch.

For sheer spectacle, Arykanda is the pick of the ruined Lycian cities. It was never as big nor as important as, say, Patara or Xanthos, but both those more famous cities must have envied the grandeur of Arykanda's setting, built as it was over five terraced levels high on a pine-clad mountainside overlooking a river valley and backed up against impregnable cliffs.  Archeological excavations started about 30 years ago and while there are still probably thousands of cubic tonnes of stony earth to barrow away, what's been uncovered so far is precious and marvellous.

Arykanda's amphitheatre is on the 4th of the city's five terraced levels

Arykanda's city hall led off the main town square

A huge bath house with a view

The press and babble of humanity which makes visiting places like Ephesus and Myra a bit of a trial is completely absent at Arykana, which is about 30 km inland from Finike and easy to miss.  Here you meet no touts and there's nothing for sale. There are no blonde Russian babes posing on terraces and tombs for the benefit of their Facebook friends, and no pompous tour guides bossing around their flocks. In fact, we saw almost no-one else at Arykanda during three hours.

The bliss of sitting under a pine tree near the stadium on the highest level, cutting into our tomatoes and bread, watched only by surveyors also on their lunch break.

Running track and seating (stadium) on the top level of Arykanda

In our solitude, and from that height, it was very easy to imagine a city in which people argued and applauded and bathed and shopped and loved until the earth quaked, and those who were left ran away to a place further down the valley.

Watching the boats sail by at Patara

We left the ancient port city of Patara till last, by chance, but that's not a bad way to do it. For the price of admission to the ruins of Patara you also get access to its better known sandy beach, Turkey's longest. There were many more people at Patara for the beach than the ruins, but it's hot, so very hot - still. We hired sunbeds under an umbrella (for the first and last time) and knew for certain that if you're from Australia or New Zealand you can't lie on a beach in Europe without thinking about home.

Roman arches at the entry to Patara

Patara was a port city built around the estuary of the Xanthos river, said by Horace and Virgil to be the birthplace of the god Apollo (??). The Lycians are thought to have moved there from Turkey's interior in the Bronze Age (3000 BC), but the height of Patara's influence was between about 200 BC and 300 AD when it was the capital of the Lycian League.  By the 7th century, by which time the Arabs had over-run the region, it was losing its clout. Its harbour had silted up, which is always a bad look for a port city. Patara is a now a swathe of wetlands (nesting for turtles) and sandy expanses covered in thorny scrub and olive trees which support a few sheep and goats. It is still pushing up ancient stones of incalculable significance.

Patara's 10,000-seat amphitheatre was even bigger than Myra's, which was bigger than Arykanda's. This was the big smoke, with big marketplaces, baths, temples (this was Apollo's town), etc. All the usual urban stuff. The most astonishing structure at Patara though is its restored assembly hall, or parliament building. From a distance the pale new stone which has been used to supplement the old stone jars the eye, offends it actually. What were they thinking?

Patara's reconstructed Lycian assembly hall, opened in 2011

Well, they, that is the Turkish government which funded the project to the tune of 6 million TL, were thinking this: "What makes this structure so special is that it once housed the national government of the Lycian League, a democratic government system setting a perfect example for all modern governmental systems, especially the Constitution of the United States of America." You need to get into it a bit, but the argument is made that the Lycian League, which first came together in 205 BC, negotiated autonomy from the Romans in 167 BC and lasted until the 3rd century AD, was the world's first recorded example of representative democracy. You sit on the benches of this chamber, which are organised in a semi-circle around a raised dais, and have at their centre a distinctive semicircular seat for the Lyciarch, who was an annually elected president, and you could be in a modern parliament. The French philosopher Montesquieu, whose book The Spirit of the Laws was the most political book in the 1780s (I've read), considered the Lycian League to be the best model for a federal republic. The framers of the US Constitution took note, and there are apparently several features of the Lycian system embedded in the US federal system, notably the way power is balanced out between the states.

So, there you have it - the cradle of democratic government is not Athens but Patara. This of course is the kind of thing that the Turks and the Greeks love to squabble about.

And I'm way way out of time. I'll lose points for that, but I've always been excitable when there are new stories to be uncovered.

Lycian inscriptions and honours outside the assembly hall