Kale Koy in western Turkey is a small town with an enormous history. The people that used to live here were called Lycians, and very little is known about them. Ancient Lycia covered a good area in this part of the Mediterranean. Homer mentioned these people for the first time when he recorded their presence at an attack against Troy in The Illiad. Perhaps they were descendants of an Anatolian tribe called the Luvians, and were a matriarchal society with many city-states. By the 6th century BC the Lycians came to be under the power of the Persians, bosses that were superseded by the Athenians, who drove the Persians out. The area then fell under the umbrella of the Delian Confederacy, but the Persians took the area back, followed in time by Alexander the Great, the Ptolemies, the Romans and then the Rhodians. Eventually it became part of Rome in the 2nd century BC.
The tremendous history goes on, as in the year 43 AD the Romans joined Lycia to adjacent Pamphylia as a single province, a union that survived until the 4th century. Lycia was never again a country, as still later they succumbed to invading Arabs and Turks. As we visited the town, we enjoyed the large sarcophagi littering the landscape, as well as the centuries-old olive trees. We also climbed to the top of the remains of a fortified castle built by the Crusaders. Later, on Zodiac tours, we peered through the glass-clear waters, and saw the rest of the city of Kekova, sunk due to an earthquake, or perhaps due to a risen sea.
