Myra Ancient City

You arrive through a sea of plastic. Modern Demre is a town of greenhouses — thousands of them, glinting to the horizon, growing tomatoes for half of Turkey. Then the road ends at a grey cliff, and the plastic age falls away. The rock face before you is carved top to bottom with doorways, columns, and porches — a vertical city of tombs, stacked like apartments for the dead. Pigeons wheel out of the openings. The effect stops conversation.

This is Myra, one of the great cities of Lycia — the ancient seafaring region of this coast. In its prime it ranked among the leading members of the Lycian League, and in the Byzantine centuries it rose to become the region's capital. Most of the city still lies buried under metres of river silt, beneath the greenhouses you just passed. What has been excavated — the tombs and the theatre — would alone justify the journey.

Step close to the tombs and study the carving. These are not abstract monuments. They are portraits of houses — stone copies of the timber homes Lycians actually lived in, with beam ends, joists, and pegged joints all faithfully reproduced in rock. Some have carved porches and reliefs of the families who rested inside. The Lycians gave their dead permanent versions of the houses they knew. As domestic architecture, the tombs outlasted every original.

Why so high on the cliff? No one can say with certainty. One old belief holds that winged spirits carried the dead to the afterlife, so the tombs waited near the sky. Take that as folklore faithfully passed along. What is documented is that early travellers found traces of red, blue, and yellow paint on these facades — the cliff was once a coloured city. Weather has since returned it to grey, with the faintest ghosts of pigment.

Beside the cliff spreads the theatre, one of the largest in Lycia. Climb its stairways and corridors and you are inside serious Roman engineering — vaulted passages, tiers of seats, and a stage building whose carved blocks lie about like puzzle pieces. Look for the theatrical masks carved in relief on fallen stones — comedy and tragedy faces that once decorated the stage, now resting in the grass at eye level.

The theatre also records disaster and recovery. In the year 141, a great earthquake wrecked cities across Lycia, this theatre among them. A wealthy Lycian named Opramoas, famous for his donations, helped fund the rebuilding here and across the region. The seats you climb are, in part, the product of one of antiquity's great acts of philanthropy. Charity, it turns out, is an old habit in Myra — and its most famous practitioner is still to come.

In the fourth century, the bishop of this city was a man named Nicholas. He attended to sailors, the poor, and children, and stories of his secret gift-giving spread across the Christian world — coins left quietly, dowries provided in the night. Those stories, retold and embroidered for centuries, travelled through Europe, changed clothes and climates, and became Santa Claus. The jolly figure of December traces his paperwork back to a bishop who walked this ground.

His church stands in Demre town, a short drive from the ruins. The Church of Saint Nicholas is a Byzantine building over earlier foundations, with vaulted aisles, fragments of wall painting, and floor mosaics in geometric patterns. A broken sarcophagus there is traditionally shown as his tomb. Pilgrims, especially from Orthodox countries, arrive year-round, and December services draw crowds. Lighting is dim and the atmosphere is genuine — lower your voice and take your time.

The saint himself did not stay. In 1087, sailors from the Italian port of Bari raided the church and carried most of the relics home, where they remain enshrined. Bari built a basilica for them and still celebrates the arrival every May. Myra kept the story, the church, and the empty tomb — and, many here would argue, the better claim on the man.

Myra also earned a line in scripture. The Acts of the Apostles records that Paul, travelling as a prisoner to Rome, changed ships at Myra's harbour. That harbour, Andriake, lies a few kilometres away, and its ruins are worth the detour — quays, warehouses, and a massive stone granary built under the Emperor Hadrian. The granary now shelters a museum of Lycian civilisation, so grain vaults hold exhibits where they once held the fleet's bread supply.

Give the site an unhurried hour. Morning light falls kindly on the tomb cliff, and the theatre holds shade into midday. Storks and sparrows nest in the ruins. Outside the gate, stalls sell orange juice and, inevitably, Santa Claus souvenirs beside Lycian tomb replicas — a strange retail summary of two thousand years. The oranges, at least, are local and excellent.

Archaeology here plays a long game. Excavations have found the city lying remarkably intact beneath its blanket of silt — in places several metres deep — including a small Byzantine chapel uncovered with wall paintings still in place. Each digging season peels back a little more of the plan. Locals joke that half of Myra is still asleep under the tomato greenhouses, and the joke happens to be accurate. What you walk through today is a fraction of what waits below the fields.

Before leaving, stand once more between cliff and theatre and let the layers settle. A seafaring people carved houses for their dead. An earthquake fell and a rich man rebuilt. A bishop gave in secret and became a legend in red. Sailors stole a saint, silt buried a capital, and farmers planted tomatoes over the ruins. Myra absorbed it all and kept going — and this evening its greenhouses will glow quietly over streets still sleeping underground.