The Kaleidoscope of Kaş
Five minutes after arriving in Kaş, I was ready to settle in for a good, long stay. This is a laid back rocky beach town with a nice hippy vibe and a crazy surf when windy. Kaş sits about one third of the distance from the start of the Lycian Way, a 520 km walking route from Fethiye to Antalya. We are driving…with a bit of hiking mixed in.
Our first night in Kaş. Nothing beats sunset by the water with a beer in hand!
We took a day trip to this little Greek island 2km off the coast of Kaş. This cute little island now seems to have a primary purpose as a day trip destination from Kaş but in its heyday, it seems everyone wanted a piece of it. The simple folk from the Neolithic times would never have imagined the strategic interest of this 12 square km. Dominated by Rhodes, then the Romans, the Sultan of Egypt, the Ottomans, the Italians, the French and the British. It’s now a tiny Greek hotspot for people looking to get away from it all! There are around 500 people who call this home and another few thousand that show up to stay in their fancy villas every now and then.
One of the big claims to fame of Kastellorizo is its Blue Cave. You have to know where to go and Nikolas kindly showed us the way. They say Finland is the happiest country (I’ve been there and that would not have been my personal assessment) but I think Nikolas is one of the happiest people I’ve met. He is a 60-year-old fisherman with two grown and successful daughters and a Finnish ex-wife (who he visits in Finland every December). Born into a longstanding family of fishermen, he has lived here all his life and says he is 100% satisfied with his life. He says if he died tomorrow, it would be fine as he’s lived a perfect life. He lives on a nice boat, has a couple of fishing boats he uses when he’s not taking people like us around.
Good luck finding it on your own…this is the entrance to the Blue Cave. The entrance is a one metre opening and the tides will determine if there’s room for a boat to get in. We made some new friends and lay down in each other’s laps to clear the entrance.
The Blue Cave is much larger than the Grotta Azzura on Capri, and in our opinion, much nicer on so many levels. We spent around 15 minutes in here, alone for most of it (compared to about the allocated two minutes in Grotta Azzura with dozens of other boats). We didn’t have to wait to get in and we didn’t have to pay an entrance fee. Where does the magical colour come from? When the sun is low, in the morning, the light refracts through the water outside the cave and reflects in through the narrow opening.
St George Island is only accessible by boat and our lovely guide Nikolas offered to drop us off for an hour. We couldn’t imagine what we would do for an hour on this little strip of land but we seemed to find all sorts of adventures. We started by scrabbling our way in flip flops over a series of sharp, craggy boulders to get to this little beach.
A swim was in order. I found out after the swim what was lurking in the water…
Pufferfish abound around this island. These unassuming creatures are considered to be the second most poisonous vertebrate in the world (after the golden poison frog). This young man showed up (after we were finished swimming) with his rod and net. He had a shiny lure on the end of his line which attracted these blue eyed beauties. He lured them within reach, scooped them up with his net and then flipped them out on to the stone patio to meet their ultimate end. I think he was paid on a piecework basis for this job. He took it very seriously.
Small but venomous with a vicious tooth to do its dirty work.
A journey down twisting lanes always yields such beauty.
Not sure which is more beautiful, the flowers and stone in this narrow lane or the sea it leads to.
There’s something about peeling paint and messy flower pots that works here but not so much at home…
Not a bad view to enjoy while I poke around in the shops.
Mommy and baby boats. Apparently the coast guard equivalent will fine boaters who head out without an oar…
We hiked up to the namesake castle at top of Kastellorizo. At a certain point in its history, it was used to incarcerate delinquent knights. Not a bad view from prison.
Definitely worth the day trip!
Sharing the sunset! Thanks FaceTime.
Friday is market day in Kaş!
This lady grows the wackiest eggplant!
Family photo at the ancient city of Myra…we recruited a few stand-ins for the kids. Myra was one of the principal six cities in the Lycian League, a group of 23 cities that together, had the social and political strength to survive many of the invaders of their time. This is the seat of democracy, the first known democratic federation where each city in the group had a proportional number of votes based on its size, and inspired today’s democratic systems. The Persians ultimately took over, followed by Alexander the Great around 330BC (Alexander seems to have been pretty much everywhere in the 330s BC), then the Romans and then the Turks (same cast of invaders, different place). But given their strength in numbers, they didn’t succumb fully to their invaders and stayed productive and prosperous in their own right for a long time.
The Lycian Rock Tombs date to the 5th and 4th centuries BC. They were meticulously carved out of the rock face and decorated with paintings, reliefs and inscriptions. There are vestiges of paint that we can’t see but here we can see a frieze above the entrance of a reclining man (presumably the deceased) surrounded by his family, with Artemis (goddess of nature) on the side with a young boy handing her something.
Another day, another theatre…but we learned another tidbit about masks at this theatre. We already knew that the actors wore masks to amplify their voices and to enable them to play more than one character. The mask’s expressions were important as they helped the audience not only understand what was going on, but enabled them to see the expressions from a distance. No opera glasses in those days to get a magnified view.
This is reputed to be the best preserved theatre in the area and has an incredible amount of decoration on the stage and along the outside walls. Stone sculptures of masks abound. Not sure why Medusa is so popular.
The fourth century Saint Nicholas came from this neck of the woods and the towns around here have adopted his modern image rather than his more severe saintly one. He’s the patron saint of a whole bunch of things, including merchants, children and toy makers and his saintly image does have a big beard and red robes (not fire engine red, mind you…). But these details are not why we associate St. Nick with gift giving. The story goes that after his parents died from an epidemic, he secretly gave gifts and distributed his inherited wealth to the poor. At one point he heard of a poor father of three daughters who had no money to pay their dowries. Unmarried girls at that time, with no gainful employment, would have ended up as prostitutes. Late one night, St Nicholas threw a bag of gold coins through the window, enabling the father to marry off his eldest daughter. One done, two to go, and he threw another bag of gold coins through the window. Second daughter sorted. When it came time for the third, the father did not leave milk and cookies out for the secret benefactor, he stayed up late into the night and caught St Nicholas in the act. St Nicholas begged him not to betray his secret. To this day, gifts from a secret Santa Claus find their way into houses around the world.
Where we expected to see checkerboard views of farmer’s fields, we see swaths of white. Turkey is home to a third of the world’s geothermal greenhouses. This is the way of the agricultural future here. Sustainability, efficient use of water in an overheating world and access to cost-effective healthy food are drivers. With more than 800 square kilometres of land covered by plastic greenhouses, this is big business. Let’s not go into the environmental impact of using plastics in agriculture…