Overview
We are excited to welcome our guests to our new archeology and cruising program, "Coastal Caria!" This is a sister trip to our program visiting the neighboring Greek islands, "Castles of Caria: Cruising the Turkish coast and Greek islands." We will travel aboard a gulet charter cruise for an adventure exploring the coastlines of Turkiye. This has been a maritime highway for millennia, with the shipwrecks, ancient cities, and ambiance to prove it!
It is impossible to see everything in one trip, yet this trip packs in a number of the significant sites while maintaining a decidedly leisurely pace. Daily cruising time never exceeds 4 hours per day. Some days we will be in ports exploring what is on offer on shore, while other days we will anchor in secluded bays enjoying the peace of the stars and the waves. With a fantastic chef and plenty of gourmet Turkish red wine on board, every evening will be a special night out under the stars.
October is the perfect time to cruise these coasts, as the water temperature is still warm enough to enjoy a swim at any time day or night, but the extreme temperatures of the summer have worn off. Still, the dramatic winds of the Aegean will not have arrived yet, and sailing should be relatively calm.
Our captain has 40 years experience sailing these waters, and this is his own private wooden ship. He and his crew of 4 keep the boat spotlessly clean, while also attending to our guest's every need. Come and relax with us, while we enter the world of ancient Greek maritime travelers.
Historical-Cultural view
The “Coastal Caria” tour is so named because this region of southwestern Anatolia was once inhabited by the Carian people, attested in many ancient Greek sources. We explore various layers of history of the region of Caria, including its bronze-era ancient seafaring past (1000-2000 BC), its Greek golden era (500-100 BC), churches from the Byzantine “late antique” period, and the prominent 14th – 15th century crusader fortresses left by the retreating Knights Hospitaller (St. John’s Order of the Knights of Malta).
The jutting peninsulas that stretch into the Aegean Sea are precipitously mountainous, making travel by land nearly impossible even today and rendering many areas accessible only be sea. But this terrain also provided plentiful safe harbors for seafarers traveling from Egypt and Canaan to the Greek city states and beyond. The evidence for this vibrant trade route is discovered in one of the best underwater archeology museums in the world, housed in the historic fortress in Bodrum and one of our key destinations in the first days of our tour. Within this museum, we learn about the trade goods of sea merchants from as early as 1300 BC whose ships were wrecked on the Carian coast but have been recovered piece by piece using advanced diving equipment in the modern era.
The Carian people were a mainland tribe who had their own language and alphabet, but established trade and political ties with various Greek entities. For example, king Mausolus of Halikarnassos was a satrap of the Persian Achaemenid empire but hired Greek architects from Priene to build his magnificent burial chamber. The resulting structure gave the name “mausoleum” to all future extravagant tombs because of its immense structure and incredibly ornate carvings. Some of the blocks of this mausoleum were used in the construction of the harbor fortress by 15th century knights, while many of the carved statues and panels are housed in the British Museum. There is also an ancient Greek theater preserved in the hillside above the Bodrum bay, and various remnants of a large defensive wall structure from that period.
Travel Program
We begin our tour in the ancient city of Telmessos (modern Fethiye), an important port city with the remains of an ampitheater and several tombs. Nowadays the town is charming yachting port and tourist starting point for walkers on the Lycian Way 500km trek, para-gliding, and other sports. It is good for a day’s walk around, with the still-functioning 16th century Ottoman bath house a popular site. Visitors wanting extra time in Turkiye might consider a few pre-tour days at the nearby resort of Oludeniz.
After embarking on our gulet on Day 3, we’ll cruise across the bay to the ancient fortification of Lydae; the destination of our first archeological exploration. This ancient Carian-Lycian city, as yet unexcavated due to its inaccessible position from land, is located in a bowl atop a rocky peninsula in a hidden position. From this vantage point, which is still only accessible by sea, it could look over the surrounding sea in three directions. For those intrepid enough to climb 30-40 minutes uphill, we are rewarded with the suggestion of a large and complex city ruin, unexcavated, in the way it has been for thousands of years. Even so, we can ascertain the locations and remains of a Greek theater, a Roman agora, and monumental Roman tombs from the local family who appear to have been important members of Roman society. Inscriptions on several tombs give us their name: Caius Julius Heliodorus, to give one example. Discovered in the 1880s by Theodore and Mabel Bent, not much has changed since their first descriptions of the place as “a paradise for archeologists and tortoises.”
Our visit to the enormous city of Kaunos will be one of the archeological highlights of the trip. Our approach is by boat through a silted-up delta which used to be the port. As we approach, we see an impressive array of tombs carved into the cliffsides, a mixture of monumental Persian tomb carving but with Ionian Greek columnar architectural features suggesting the range of cultural influences in this region. In the city itself, we find all the elements of a prosperous city in antiquity: the theater, the agora, shrines to the Gods, tombs for the elites. There is also an infrequently visited but well-preserved Byzantine church from the late 6th century AD, which offers the chance to discuss the ways in which Christianization affected cities throughout the Byzantine Empire. We often encounter layers and layers of history in each site with the earliest remains reflecting the local Carian people, followed by Greek and Roman monumental structures, and finally Byzantine churches.
The ancient settlement of Loryma offers another chance to scramble up the rocky hillside from the coast in order to discover the walls of a necropolis that look directly across the straits to the island of Rhodes. In 395 BC, the Athenian general Konon assembled a fleet of some 90 ships in this bay for an invasion of Rhodes. But that shouldn’t be considered ancient: archeological surveys have discovered that this bay has been inhabited since at least 5000 BC.
At the end of the Datca peninsula, we explore the city of Knidos, one of the archeological highlights of the tour. This city with shrines to Aphrodite and Apollo was the center of the confederation of states called the Dorian Hexapolis in the 4th century BC. With its sandy isthmus between rocky shore and island, it was famous for two protected bays at opposite points of the wind. Thus, ancient seafarers awaiting favorable winds would often stay for many days worshipping at the city’s major shrine dedicated to Aphrodite, and reputedly visiting the city’s equally famous porneio. Today, the hillside is littered with the remains of hundreds of buildings and marble shrines, making it easy to imagine an incredible city with sea views in every direction. A theater and agora dominate the lower structures along the shore, while the shrine sites are situated further up the slope.
After disembarking from the gulet in Bodrum, we’ll spend one final day exploring. This city was called Halikarnassos in ancient times and was an important cultural center and birthplace of distinguished figures such as Herodotus, the “father of history.” The port has proved vital throughout the millenia with remnants of past empires dotting its protected bay; the tomb of Mausolus (built around 350 BC) was considered one of the seven wonders of the world. Alexander the Great assaulted the castle, such was its importance in his era. On our day in Bodrum, we will explore the 15th century Castle of St. Peter built by the Knights Hospitaller in the 15th century, a huge fortress above the bay that now houses the Underwater Archeology Museum. This unique museum features a dizzying array of incredible artifacts excavated from ancient shipwrecks along the Carian coast.
The charter boat
The boat is a double-masted ketch style gulet, measuring 135 feet long, skippered and owned by a captain who has over 40 years’ experience sailing these coastlines (his grown children are also skippers in their own right!). I think it’s important that he skippers his own boat, so he knows every detail about its engine and water systems. The captain also knows all the most favorable anchorages, whether we are at port or in a secluded bay. The boat features 11 cabins for potentially 22 guests (in addition to 5 crew) and features a variety of common spaces both shady and sunny, forward and aft, indoor and outdoor, and a very nice bar space. There are even some sunning cushions on the upper solar-panel deck which were placed specially, according to the captain, for French clients who insisted on nude sun-bathing. The point is this boat has a lot of common space to find a conversation corner or a quiet corner. My plan is to limit our group to 17 people rather than fill the boat to capacity, thus giving us the luxury of even-more deck space.
The beds have good quality mattresses, and each cabin features a private bath/shower. The boat is older than others we saw (built in 2000) with less shiny trim, but the boat features solid teak cabin doors, a strong hull, classic portal windows, and the captain spends his life either sailing or upgrading the boat. For example, while inspecting the boat in dry dock last week, he was in the process of repainting the hull and replacing every air-conditioning motor on the boat (each room has an individual air conditioner, which are especially needed for cruises in July and August). I found that the sleek new gulets are extremely over-priced for what one gets, which is essentially the same-sized cabins and the same amount of deck space. The newer boats feature jacuzzis on the deck, private television sets in each room, shiny metal/glass trim etc but for my eye, don’t justify double or triple the rental expense.
In summary, I’ve chosen the older, well-maintained boat at a reasonable cost, skippered by the owner himself, with extra deck space which I’ll further maximize by limiting our total group size.
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Tamada Club