Fethiye Tourist Attractions

Fethiye occupies the site of ancient Telmessos, an important Lycian city which was already famed in the time of Croesus for its soothsayers. It is now difficult after two earthquakes and the subsequent rebuilding to find any traces of ancient Telmessos in the modern town. The boundaries of the Hellenistic and Roman towns are no doubt marked out by the almost vertical rock face to the west, the Roman tombs on the east side of the town and the Lycian necropolis to the south. The discovery of sarcophagi near the edge of the modern town indicates the course of the ancient coastline.On the castle hill, occupied in the Middle Ages by the Knights of St John and by the Genoese, there are remains of much earlier buildings. The remains of houses on the northwest side of the hill, with a number of cisterns and water-supply channels suggest that there was an unwalled Lycian settlement here, though in a later period the focus of urban life moved down to the coastal plain. Of the ancient theater, which was located and described by the French traveler Charles Texier before the 1856 earthquake, nothing can now be seen but the outline of the cavea (auditorium).