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A Day in the Capital of Lycia, Xanthos and Letoon
Historical Sites

A Day in the Capital of Lycia, Xanthos and Letoon

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The Eşen Çayı, known in antiquity as the Xanthos, flows through the valley it gave its name to and reaches the Mediterranean. Inland in the valley, on two hills on the river's left bank, rises Xanthos, in antiquity the largest administrative centre of Lycia.

Kaş, Antalya
Historical Sites
Radar Editör
September 30, 2026

About Trip

The Eşen Çayı, known in antiquity as the Xanthos, flows through the valley it gave its name to and reaches the Mediterranean. Inland in the valley, on two hills on the river's left bank, rises Xanthos, in antiquity the largest administrative centre of Lycia. Four kilometres to the southwest lies Letoon, the religious centre of Lycia. The two sites were inscribed together on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1988. The Ministry of Culture and Tourism describes Xanthos as the political and administrative centre of ancient Lycia and Letoon as its religious centre. This trip fits into a single day the two best places for understanding Lycian civilisation: a capital famous for its pillar tombs and a sanctuary where the inscription that unlocked the Lycian language was found.

Getting there

Xanthos lies right next to the village of Kınık in the district of Kaş, 46 kilometres from Fethiye. The highway between Fethiye and Kaş passes close to the archaeological site; visitors coming from Kaş use the same road. Letoon lies within the province of Muğla, near the village of Kumluova; the Culture Portal notes that the two sites stand on the border between Muğla and Antalya. The two sites are about 4 kilometres apart and linked by a short drive. If you plan to use public transport, check the current timetables of the services between Fethiye and Kaş before setting off; for getting between the sites, your own vehicle or a taxi is the most comfortable option. Check visiting hours and entry conditions on the museum website of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism.

The capital of Lycia

The name of Xanthos appears even in one of the oldest texts of Western literature: in Homer's Iliad, the Lycian leaders Glaucus and Sarpedon, who fought at Troy, come from the lands along the river Xanthos. The oldest traces of settlement on the acropolis go back to the 8th century BC; sources give even earlier dates for the city's origins. The event that defined the city's history took place in the middle of the 6th century BC. According to the ministry's record, Xanthos came under Persian rule in 545 BC. Herodotus tells how, faced with the army of the Persian commander Harpagus, the people of Xanthos burned their acropolis rather than surrender and fought to the last man. The city was refounded, burned down completely once again about a century later, and rose once more.

Ancient authors disagree about what happened in the time of Alexander the Great: Arrian writes that the city surrendered peacefully, while Appian says it was sacked. In the 2nd century BC Xanthos became the capital of the Lycian League formed by the cities of Lycia. In 42 BC, during the Roman civil war, Brutus besieged the city; Plutarch reports that at the end of the siege most of the population perished in the fire. The city was rebuilt under Mark Antony and continued its life under Roman and then Byzantine rule. According to the ministry, the Byzantine period lasted until the Arab raids of the 7th century.

Pillar tombs and inscriptions

What sets Xanthos apart is the way the Lycians buried their dead. Alongside rock-cut tombs and sarcophagi, the city has burial chambers set on top of tall stone pillars. The most famous of them is the Harpy Tomb, dated to between 480 and 470 BC and named after its winged female figures. The pillar still stands in place today; however, the reliefs that surrounded the burial chamber were taken to England in the 19th century and replaced with cement casts. The reliefs show standing figures presenting gifts to seated figures.

The Inscribed Pillar, meanwhile, is one of the most important documents for understanding the Lycian language. Dated to around 400 BC, the pillar carries on its faces a Lycian text of about 250 lines, a Greek poem of 12 lines and a section written in a second dialect of Lycian. The pillar was a ruler's funerary monument, and its upper part broke off in antiquity. The owner's name has been largely erased from the stone; scholars believe he was Kheriga of the ruling dynasty. Because the inscription carries Lycian, Greek and a second Lycian dialect side by side, it holds a place in the decipherment of the language comparable to the Rosetta Stone.

The theatre, the agora and the two acropolises

The city spreads over two hills: the Lycian acropolis stands on one, the Roman acropolis on the other. The centre of the visit is the Roman theatre, which according to the Culture Portal held about 2,200 people. You can climb its rows of seats, look out over the city's two hills and the plain, and plan the rest of your visit. The Roman agora is also one of the city's important buildings. The Culture Portal also lists among the city's main structures the Dipylon, the double-passage city gate dated to between AD 68 and 70. The city is known to have been reorganised on a grid plan in the Roman period and lined with colonnaded buildings; earthquakes in the 6th century damaged its structures.

Do not miss the rock-cut tombs and sarcophagi scattered around the city either. Together with the pillar tombs, they are part of the funerary architecture that the ministry counts among the features that made Xanthos a World Heritage site; look carefully at the slopes as you walk between the hills.

Fellows and the Xanthian marbles

The man who introduced Xanthos to Europe in the 19th century was the English traveller Charles Fellows. Fellows toured the region in 1838; he returned in the autumn of 1841 with Ottoman permission and, in work lasting until the spring of 1842, shipped some 80 tons of material to England in 82 cases. Today the Nereid Monument, the Tomb of Payava and the original reliefs of the Harpy Tomb are on display in the British Museum. The Inscribed Pillar stayed where it was, because carrying it in the small boats of the time was unthinkable; Fellows took only paper casts of its inscriptions. At Xanthos, only the podium of the Nereid Monument can be seen in place today. Scientific excavations in the city began in 1950 with a French team led by Henri Metzger, and since 2011 Turkish scholars have continued the work.

Letoon

Letoon, four kilometres southwest of Xanthos, was the religious centre of Lycia in antiquity; inscriptions found at the site show that it also played the role of a political centre within the Lycian federation. The site takes its name from Leto, who in ancient mythology is named as the mother of Apollo and Artemis. The oldest traces here date to the 7th century BC, and the site was abandoned in the 7th century AD.

When you enter Letoon, three temples stand side by side. According to the measurements given by the ministry, the largest is the Temple of Leto, surrounded by a colonnade, at about 30.25 by 15.75 metres. The Doric Temple of Apollo measures 27.90 by 15.07 metres, and the smallest, the Temple of Artemis, 18.20 by 8.70 metres. Part of the Temple of Leto was re-erected between 2000 and 2007 using original pieces recovered in the excavations. To the southwest of the temples is a monumental fountain, a nymphaeum, built over a spring. Because the groundwater rises with the seasons, the lower parts of the buildings are under water for part of the year; channels were dug in 2006 to drain the water during excavation. The site also has a Hellenistic theatre set against the natural slope.

Letoon's greatest gift to the world is a stone. Found during excavation in 1973 and dated to 337 BC, the four-sided stele records a decision taken by the people of Xanthos in Lycian, Greek and Aramaic. The Lycian text runs to 41 lines, the Greek to 35 and the Aramaic to 27, and the three texts are not word-for-word translations of one another. Comparing the readable Greek and Aramaic texts with the Lycian one was a major step in deciphering the Lycian language. The stele is now on display in the Fethiye Museum; stopping at the museum on your way back to Fethiye after visiting Letoon is the natural end to the trip.

Why World Heritage

Xanthos and Letoon were inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1988, under number 484 and on the basis of cultural criteria (ii) and (iii). The Ministry of Culture and Tourism links the decision to Xanthos being the political centre of Lycian civilisation, to its distinctive funerary architecture, its monuments and its inscriptions. The ministry also stresses that in every period the buildings at the two sites combined Lycian tradition with Hellenistic and Roman influences. In other words, what you see here is not just a Roman city; it is the trace left by a people of Anatolia with its own language, its own form of tomb and its own political union.

Close to Patara

Patara, one of the largest settlements of the Xanthos valley, was the only one of them open to the sea, and ancient geographers describe it as lying southeast of the river mouth. Today Patara, near the village of Gelemiş, is close enough to Xanthos to be part of the same trip. There you can see the council building constructed at the beginning of the 1st century BC and used as the assembly hall of the Lycian League, the Roman theatre and the lighthouse built under Nero in AD 60. Once you have seen the political story of the capital at Xanthos, the secret of the language at Letoon and the hall where the league met at Patara, you will have read three faces of Lycia together. If you have one day, give the morning to Xanthos and the midday to Letoon; leaving Patara for the next day means you will not have to rush.

Season and time of day

Shade may be limited at the archaeological sites; in summer, choose the early morning or late afternoon for your visit. When the groundwater rises at Letoon, some of the buildings appear to stand in water; this makes for an interesting photograph but can make it harder to approach some sections.

Practical notes

  • Check the visiting hours, closing days and entry conditions for Xanthos and Letoon on the museum website of the Ministry of Culture and Tourism; for the trilingual stele, check the Fethiye Museum's hours as well.
  • The two sites are in different provinces: Xanthos in the Kaş district of Antalya, Letoon in the province of Muğla.
  • Bring sturdy shoes, a hat and water; the ground among the ruins is stony and uneven.
  • Do not climb on the pillars, sarcophagi or inscribed stones, and do not touch the inscriptions.

Sources

Location - A Day in the Capital of Lycia, Xanthos and Letoon

Trip Info
CityKaş, Antalya
TypeHistorical Sites
DateSeptember 30, 2026
SourceRadar Editör
Radar TürkiyeAuthorRadar TürkiyeVisit SourceGet Directions