June | 2011 | Cukurbagli's Blog

I was quite happy with one dog but since Wilf’s departure Minnie has seemed to be missing the company of another dog. When I’ve been away she has been going up the road a couple of miles to visit some friends who have five or six dogs. They didn’t mind and I was happy to fetch her back each time but the root cause wasn’t being addressed. I’d been thinking of getting another dog and had my ear bent a bit to take a puppy but I preferred to have an older dog, in the end I took in this one because she had been abused by someone who had hacked her tail off. I’ll refrain from giving my opinion of what should be done to abusers of animals.

I have called her Molly after my niece’s baby daughter, she’s about 12 or 15 months old and is keen on chewing things, mats, shoes etc. In fact one of my rubber gardening shoes has gone missing altogether, I can’t find it anywhere so I hope she hasn’t eaten it.

I’ve been doing a bit of sightseeing in the last couple of weeks, places that I should have been to but haven’t. I was introduced to a visitor from America who is going to a lot of places around the world photographing and writing about them. She wanted to have a look at some of the archaeological sites near here so I decided to take a few days off from my labours, drag out my camera which hasn’t seen any proper work for a while and accompany her. Arykanda was the first place we went. There is a main road which goes north from Finike but the coast road is such a trial to get there I thought we could do it more quickly heading north from Demre which is a lot nearer. It wasn’t until we got lost up in the mountains and needed help from the maps that I noticed that a section of one of the roads was indicated on the map in orange colour, the rest were all red. Well we toured around a lot of dirt roads until we came close to getting bogged down and I decided that going back a few miles was the bravest thing to do. We could have been stuck in mud up there for a long time and we hadn’t seen anyone to ask the way so we turned round and retraced our steps until we saw a sign and followed that road. The signs up there are very few and far between.

This is an abandoned school on the road into the mountains, people have moved away from a lot of villages into the towns and cities for a less hard life so the countryside is often deserted apart from a few goatherders.

Anyway we eventually found the right road and carried on until I saw a sign for Arykanda in my rearview mirror and stopped to have a look. The sign that should have been facing our side of the road had a truck parked in front of it blocking my view so we went up a little lane and found the place.

Arykanda was discovered by an English traveller and researcher Charles Fellows, one of the first travel writers of which there are now legions trotting around the globe. It was seen by other travellers during the following years but remained largely forgotten due to the difficulties of getting there.

Arykanda appears to have been inhabited from the end of the late Calcolithic Age (Copper Age beginning in the late 5th Millenium BC) and survived because of it’s easily defensible location with a huge rock cliff behind it and thick forests in front. Even now it is barely visible from the road and is easy to miss if you don’t see the signposts. After a string of earthquakes necessitating major rebuilding each time the inhabitants moved to a place a little way away.

The city is now being conserved and tourism is being encouraged although there were only a few people there when we visited. There are temples dedicated to Helios and Trajan and the remains of other temples as yet of unknown dedication. Here are a few photographs to whet the appetite.

This is the bath complex from the rear and the front respectively.

The centre of one of the mosaics, the photograph doesn’t really do the whole thing justice.

There are lots more things to see, and the setting below the huge cliff is stunning, it is well worth a visit.
On the lane up to the site there is a very nice pension and restaurant where we had something to eat and met Mustafa and Aysel who own and run it. A very pleasant watering hole after clambering around ruins and getting lost in the mountains.