Few times in my life have I so physically felt the collective void of a people vanished, the expectant silence that hangs over the empty houses of a missing population. Once was while wandering through the empty barracks at the Dachau concentration camp in Germany, and the other, walking through the largest and best preserved ghost town in all of Asia minor Kayakoy, Turkey. Read more about things to do in Side, Turkey and choose an ideal excursion or tour there https://www.vigotour.com/en/yer/antalya/side-turkey-5.html.
Once a thriving Greek village, this town of over one thousand houses, two churches, fourteen chapels, and two schools, was completely deserted in 1923 when the 25,000 Greek inhabitants living there, along with more than a million other Greeks living throughout Turkey were repatriated to Greece through a massive government mandated population exchange between the two countries following the Greek war of independence. Since then, the village of Kayakoy, as it is called in Turkish, or Karmylassos, as it was called in Greek, which had been continually inhabited since at least the 13th century, has stood empty and crumbling, with only the breeze from the mountains and mist from the sea blowing through it’s empty houses and streets.
Historically, Turks and Greeks had lived together in this region for centuries, the Turks as farmers in the Kaya valley and the Greeks living on the hillside dealing in crafts and trades. A Greek presence in this region goes back for centuries. The ancient Greek historian Stravon (66 BC – 23 AD) mentioned this region when he stated that “one reaches a steep and difficult place; karmylessos is located here along a narrow and deep river…”.
I visited Kayakoy as a part of a cruise on a small Turkish yacht called a ‘gullet’, which is usually chartered from between one day to a few weeks for a very reasonable price, to sail along the Turkish Mediterranean coast, carrying tourists to all of the prominent archaeological sites, villages, and beaches along the way. Members of my extended family and I this year had undertaken a ten day-long family trip heading east out of the Southern Turkish town of Fetiye, and had been sailing and sleeping on the gullet for about 3 days, alternately playing in the water, wandering small fishing villages, and posing for pictures by ancient Greek statues. On one particular bright and sunny morning, we awoke to learn that we were anchored in a small bay just outside of the tourist beach town of Oludeniz. After breakfast, we all went on a minibus tour of the surrounding Lycian tombs, amphitheaters, and other ancient ruins in the area (Lycia was an ancient people, language, country, and province of the Roman Empire that lies today in the Antalya Province on the southern coast of Turkey.) Our tour guide then asked us if we had enough energy (and lira) to visit a nearby Greek ghost town. A small, curious, energetic number of us volunteered, and we piled into the minivan again to head up a mountain, and down the other side into a small, steep, green valley overlooking the sea.
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