Basic moments
According to the beliefs of the Lycians, after death, the souls of people turned into winged creatures similar to the Sirens. The higher the burial is, the faster the soul of the deceased will go to heaven. That is why the necropolis was built above the city, on a rocky cliff.
The Lycian tombs of Myra were carved out of rock, and no other building materials were used for the necropolis. The facades of the burials were made to look like houses or temples. On them you can see the resemblance of pylons, columns, carved doors and relief images. Some tombs are decorated with a gable roof carved into the rock.
Under the rock necropolis there is a Greco-Roman theater. For visitors, the Lycian Tombs of Myra are open daily: from April to October from 9.00 to 19.00, from November to March from 9.00 to 17.00.
City of Peace
The ancient city of Myra, the ruins of which are located just 2 km from the center of modern Demre, was founded in the 5th century BC. Two centuries later, this city became the capital of ancient Lycia. According to legend, in the year 60, Christ’s associate, the Apostle Paul, visited here and brought the Christian faith to these lands. During the Byzantine era, Mira was a major religious center and flourished for several centuries.
In the 8th century there was a major flood. The water filled the bed of the Miros River flowing through the city with silt and mud. The inhabitants could no longer go down the river to the Mediterranean Sea, so they moved the city to where the quarters of modern Demre are now located.
Gradually, Myra lost its former power, but it remained a place of Christian pilgrimage, and especially many believers came to worship the Lycian tombs. Today, Demre is a major tourist center that unites several coastal settlements.
How to get there
The Lycian Tombs of Myra are located in the northern part of the city of Demre, next to Karabucak Street, 4.5 km from the Mediterranean coast. From Antalya International Airport you can get here by rented car or taxi.
Now we are heading to the Lycian sakha tombs and a well-preserved ancient Roman amphitheater - the remains of the largest city of the Lycian state - Myra. Here we will learn about the main beliefs of the Lycians, their myths and why these rock tombs, striking the depths of the human imagination, were built this way.
According to Greek mythology, the titanic goddess Lethe (Latona), the wife of Zeus, hid from the persecution of his new wife Hera (by the serpent Python) and gave birth to twins Apollo and Artemis on the island of Delos (according to another version, in the mountains in the southeast of Asia Minor) , found these places deserted, beautiful and hidden from the eyes of the omnipresent gods, which would make it possible to raise children. After giving birth, she needed a bath in a source of clean water and Leto was also tormented by thirst, but local shepherds muddied the water in the source she found and tried to drive her away, for which they were turned by the goddess into frogs. It was at this place that the spiritual center of Lycia arose - Letun, located not far from Myra. Another story relating to these events says that it was the wolves who helped Leto then find the fertile river Xanthos. In gratitude, the goddess nicknamed this country Lycia - “lykos” in Greek means wolf. This mythology was also reflected in the art of the Lycians.
The Lycian cult of the goddess Leto (Latona) was one of the many forms of the widespread religion of the mother deity, which originated in ancient Anatolia and spread throughout the ancient world. Apparently this was an echo of the matriarchy that flourished in those ancient times. Therefore, Apollo and Artemis found special reverence in Lycia as her children. As we remember, the Church of St. Nicholas the Pleasant in Myra was built on the ruins of the Temple of Artemis.
In the 13th century, Myra was completely covered by mudflows of the Miros River due to strong earthquakes, as a result of which the river bed turned back. Currently, the ancient city is completely hidden underground and only two monuments of Lycian culture remain from it - a stunning rock necropolis and a large amphitheater from Roman times, located at the foot of the Lycian mountains.
Of all the cultural heritage of the Lycians, it is the tombs that are especially well preserved. The Lycians believed that the souls of dead people came out of their tombs and turned into winged siren-like creatures. This is why Lycian tombs were often located on the peaks or rocky slopes of mountains along the coast.
More than a thousand tombs have been discovered in the territory of former Lycia, among which the most common and impressive are tombs carved into natural rocks. Sometimes they represent examples of the Greek, especially Ionian style, sometimes - imitation of wooden buildings characteristic of Lycia. All sculptures are imbued with the spirit of true Greek art. They were carved for high-ranking and wealthy people. It was believed that the higher the tomb was in the mountains, the closer the deceased became to the Gods. In the VI-IV centuries. BC. In Lycia, rock tombs with porticoes were built, repeating in stone the elements of the wooden structure of the Lycian houses, which we see with you in the World.
03.
The tombs are amazing not because they are actually tombs, but because they are quite well preserved. The idea of carving tombs into rocks is not new; we all know what remains of the once grandiose temples of antiquity and archaic times - almost nothing. Temples essentially served the construction needs of the dominant peoples of their time. The rock structures were of no value for construction and were simply simply plundered, but remained generally untouched. Therefore, we have this unique opportunity to contemplate the monuments of those eras as their contemporaries saw them.
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You experience amazing sensations when you look at these frozen imprints of History, which have penetrated into our world from the shaky World of reflections of the past. The Lycian tombs break our hardened ideas about the world, awaken the archetypal memory of humanity and force us to open our eyes and see in a new way what was once before you. These people were born, loved, suffered, perished, died, and it was these tombs that left their mark on History so that we, even without knowing about those who were once buried in them, thought about our place in the world, about the trace that we will leave on earth...
05.
So, thinking, I absorbed these, my own and completely alien, thoughts of people who had dissolved in the darkness of History, vague images and unfamiliar feelings that washed over me... It is from such examples of historical monuments that you clearly understand the frailty of existence; your soul wakes up, and while your consciousness is silent due to the unusual impression of everything you saw, your soul begins to tell you why you are here on this planet, why this whole human game is happening, in which we are immersed and which we treat like this , as if we live in this body forever...)
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There is no access to the tombs; they are guarded. You have to suppress the boyish impulses to get inside the tombs, feel yourself there and find out with curiosity for yourself - “how is it”!?...)
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The example of these tombs shows that the mudflows that destroyed the ancient city reached the lower tiers of the Lycian necropolis in Myra.
09.
This is especially noticeable in the photo below. By the way, the “tomato greenhouses” that built up all the spaces of the ancient city come close to the Lycian monuments and they are very discordant against their background.
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I probably would have stood like this, absorbing these sensations for hours, if it weren’t for the heat and the severe time limitations on being able to stay here...
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Tombs were carved on almost the entire relatively vertical surface of these rocks, but this particular place is most saturated with them.
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It must be said that the Lycians buried their dead not only in rock necropolises, but also in gigantic sarcophagi carved from limestone, and this was even more common everywhere, especially closer to Roman times. During the era of the Roman Empire, the Lycian sarcophagi gradually became smaller in size...
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The Lycian rock necropolis in Myra made an incredible impression. My feelings that I experienced and tried to convey to the reader cannot be translated into simple words. Probably, only by visiting here and seeing “live” all this past splendor of the Lycian people, it is possible, in the immeasurable scope of imagination, to imagine and feel exactly our place in the world in which we live...
It is precisely because the Lycian tombs made such a strong impression that I decided to talk in a separate post about the amphitheater, which comes almost close to the tombs, because these are completely different sensations, a different world and a completely different History...
Lycian tombs- these are ancient tombs preserved in the rocks in the city of Demre in Turkey, on the territory of the ancient city of Mira.
Description of the Lycian tombs
The Lycian rock tombs in the city of Demre in Turkey are considered one of the most interesting of all the other burial sites in what is now Turkey.
They date back to the 6th century BC. and represent an almost exact reproduction of ancient dwellings of that era. The Lycian tombs at Demre themselves consist of one or more chamber-rooms in which the dead are buried on a stone podium, as expected - with jewelry, clothing and food. The rock tombs in Myra have only one entrance, which was locked with a large stone. Currently, almost all of them are looted and gaping with open holes. The Lycians believed that the higher the tomb was made according to the height of its location in the mountains, the closer the deceased became to the Gods.
The windows and doors at the front of the tombs are decorated with images from the lives of the dead.
The most famous is the tomb of Amyntas, which is a platform with a portico carved into the rock and two Ionic columns. On the wall of the tomb there is an inscription in Greek “Amintas, son of Hermagios”.
Lycian tombs in Myra (Rock-cut tombs in Myra) can be seen in the ancient capital of Lycia, which is located 5 kilometers from the Mediterranean Sea, on the Andrak River, at the mouth of which there was once the harbor of Andriake; according to legend, the Apostle Paul landed in this place before his departure to Rome. On the mountainside facing the sea, which frames the Demre plain, to the north-west you can see the ruins of an ancient acropolis. The wall is two hundred meters high, built on a foundation of cyclopean stones. During excavations, records were discovered in the Lycian language, characterizing the area with the name "Thermilia", thus indicating that the history of Myra goes back several thousand years BC.
There are several versions about how the name of the city arose, the first: from the word “myrrh” - the resin from which incense was made for the church. Second: the name of the city “Maura” is of Etruscan origin and means “place of the Mother Goddess”, in phonetic pronunciation the name changed first to “Mura” and later to “Mira”. In the third version, in the ancient Lycian language, Mira means the city of the Sun.
In ancient times, Myra was the capital of Lycia and existed long before the advent of our era. At one time, it was part of the Lycian Union and was even awarded the right to mint its own coins. The decline of the city is directly related to the increasing frequency of Arab raids in the 7th century, as well as the flooding of the local river with mud. In the Christian world, the former capital of the great ancient state is known thanks to the acts of Nicholas the Wonderworker, who in 300 AD studied in Xanth and soon became the bishop of Myra. After his death, miraculous healings began to occur in the city among believers who came to the Church of St. Nicholas to worship his ashes, and over time, Mira became a place of pilgrimage for adherents of the holy faith.
Repin, “Nicholas of Myra saves three innocently convicted people from death”
Saint Nicholas (Nicholas the Pleasant; Nicholas the Wonderworker - ca. 270-ca. 345)) is one of the most beloved saints in Rus'; many churches were erected in his honor. He is revered as a miracle worker and considered the patron saint of sailors, merchants and children. In European folklore, the prototype of Santa Claus.
Saint Nicholas became famous as a pacifier of warring parties, a defender of the unjustly condemned, and a deliverer from needless death. The worldly mayor Eustathius, bribed by the envious people of certain three men, condemned them to death. Having learned about the unjust act of the worldly mayor, Saint Nicholas immediately hastened to help. He appeared at the execution site when the sword was already raised over the heads of the innocently condemned. Having removed the guards, the saint stopped the executioner's hand. No one dared to stop him. The mayor, menacingly denounced by Saint Nicholas, confessed to his sin and asked to accept his repentance. This story inspired I. Repin and he expressed his feelings in this picture.
In Western Europe, the saint is still perceived to this day as the protector of children, to whom, according to ancient writings, he brought gifts on Christmas night throughout the years that he lived here. During the time of the Byzantine Emperor Constantine IX Monomakh, the Church of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker was surrounded by a fortress wall in order to preserve the shrine from the encroachments of the Arabs. In the spring of 1087, the remains of St. Nicholas were transported to Italy, where they are kept to this day. Today, thousands of pilgrims from different countries of the world come to Mira (Demre), especially to visit the church of the great saint.
In Latin, Saint Nicholas sounds like Santa Nikolaus, can you guess what this name turned into over time? Certainly Santa Claus! Demre (Mira) is the birthplace of Santa Claus, his prototype is a real person - the famous Nikolai Ugodnik.
Not far from the tombs is the ancient theater of the city of Mira. I will explain why this theater is considered Greco-Roman. Lycia was conquered by the Greeks and it is thanks to the Greeks that the theater in Myra has the appearance of a classical theater building. The main difference between the Greek theater is its semicircular structure with a stage in the center, on which performances took place. There are spectator seats adjacent to the stage. During its history, the theater was repeatedly destroyed, subjected to earthquakes, and flooded, but was always restored. After some time, Lycia ceded to the Roman Empire. The Romans completed the construction of the theater and added some touches to its design and decoration. That is why the theater is considered Greco-Roman.
The differences between the Roman amphitheater and the Greek theater are obvious: the amphitheater, for example the most popular - the Colosseum, has a circular structure like a circus, and the audience seats completely surround the stage on all sides. Thanks to its semicircular structure, the theater in Mir has excellent acoustics, such that even a whisper from the stage can be heard in the very last row.
Climate. The weather conditions in this region are largely influenced by the Mediterranean climate. In winter, the air temperature here rarely drops below +10 degrees, and in summer it often exceeds +30. Tourist interest in these places is highest between May and September, when numerous vacationers travel here from the Antalya coast along the Demre-Mira-Kekova route in order to diversify their beach holiday as much as possible. Most excursion routes start at 7 am and last until the evening, so tourists return from the trip tired but happy.
How to get there. Transport. The city of Demre, with the archaeological complex of Mira, is located several tens of kilometers from Antalya, and 45 km from Kas. Kalkan, Finike and Olympos are nearby. Traveling independently from Antalya Airport is possible by rented car or taxi. It is strongly recommended to use the services of a local driver, as the road is at times very difficult and sometimes unsafe.
In the Middle Ages, Myra (Demre) became one of the centers of pilgrimage for Christians. Subsequently, a monastery was built in Mir (Demre) near the temple of St. Nicholas the Pleasant.
In the 10th century AD, the relics of the saint were taken from Myra (Demre) to Italy. According to one version, they were stolen, according to another, they tried to save the sarcophagus with relics from looting and voluntarily allowed it to be transported. However, miracles in Demre (Mira) did not stop, and then a legend arose that the monks indicated the wrong grave, and in fact, the relics of the saint are still in Demre (Mira).
Temple of St. Nicholas the Pleasant is the main attraction of Demre (Mira).
Cuisine and shopping. There are few culinary establishments in Demre, although the choice of dishes allows you to appreciate all the delights of national Turkish cuisine. For shopping here, of course, this is not the best place in Turkey, but it is quite possible to buy various icons, healing oils, crosses with a chain and all sorts of talismans. Their prices are quite high, but the real value of these things cannot be overestimated. Icons and healing oils, sold in special bottles, are in high demand, so their cost is inflated initially, however, this is precisely what you should not save on.
Demre-Mira-Kekova is one of the most popular and interesting excursions in Antalya. Among tourists who have ever been to Turkey, there are few who have not seen the ancient Lycian city of Myra, touched the sarcophagus of St. Nicholas or sat on the steps of the local amphitheater. Fullness of impressions and a lot of pleasant emotions certainly accompany this trip, making a vacation on the Mediterranean coast much more eventful and educational.
Official information
Country Türkiye
Territory of the ancient state of Lycia, Lycian tombs
General information about Lycia (according to published sources)
According to ancient Greek myth, the goddess Leto, who gave birth to Apollo and Artemis in the mountainous region of southeast Asia Minor, gave it the name Lycia in memory of the wolves who guarded it.
Lycia is an ancient country in the south of Asia Minor, which was located on the territory of the modern Turkish provinces of Mugla and Antalya. In the first thousand cell years BC e. Lycia was inhabited by the Lycians,descendants of the Luwians,who, before assimilation by the Greeks, spoke one of the Hittite-Luvian languages and used alphabetic writing. From the middle of the 6th century. BC. Lycia was under Persian rule her eastern part in IV V. BC ruled by the Lycian king Pericles). At the end of IV V. BC. Lycia was part of the empire of Alexander the Great. B 295-197 gg. BC. she was under the rule of the Ptolemies. In 197 BC. e. Lycia became one of the possessions of the Seleucids. Later, many cities in the region united into the Lycian Union. In the 1st century BC e. as an autonomous state Lycia was part of the Roman Empire in 43 AD. Emperor Claudius formedon the territory of Lycia and Pamphylia a Roman province. The Lycians occupied the valley of the Xanthus River, as well as adjacent territories, up to approximately 50 km upstream, and from the mouth along the Mediterranean coast. The largest city in Lycia was Xanthos, located on the Xanthos River, 7 km from the sea.After temporary freedom under Nero, Lycia lost its autonomy forever. Theodosius separated it from Pamphylia, and Mira became the capital of the region. After 395, Lycia was associated with the Byzantine Empire, and from the 11th century it came under Muslim rule.
Faith, culture and tombs of the Lycians (according to published sources)
Of all the cultural heritage of the Lycians, they are especially well preserved tombs. The Lycians believed that the souls of dead people migrated from their tombs and turned into winged siren-like creatures. That is why Lycian tombs are often were located on ver tires or rocky slopesmountains along the coast.On the territory of the former Lycia more than a thousand were discovered tombs , among which the most common are tombs, carved nye in the rocks.
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And sometimes oh Lycian tombspresent examples of the Greek, especially Ionian style, sometimes - imitation of wooden buildings characteristic of Lycia; the sculptures are all imbued with the spirit of true Greek art (http://ru.wikipedia.org)
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The oldest and rarest form of funerary monuments is l Ician tombs with columns. Famous people were usually buried in such tombs. Usually, They They were a monolithic slab pointed upward, standing either on a stepped base or on a mountain. A Lycian tomb often consisted of two rooms, one of which was carved at the top of the tomb and was square in shape. The stone slab representing the lid had various shapes, and the upper room was decorated with reliefs.
The most common form of burial was Lycian sarcophagi, which were differentgigantic in size. They consisted of several parts: a burial chamber, a base and a lid topped with a ridge. Sarcophagi were often decorated with reliefs. Scientists date most of the surviving tombs to the era of the Roman Empire. As a rule, they were simpler and smaller than their more ancient predecessors (http://www.fantasy-travel.ru)
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In the VI-IV centuries. BC. in Lycia, rock tombs were built with porticoes that repeated elements of a wooden structure in stone. Some columns of the Lycian tombs are considered prototypes of the Ionic order in architecture. The ruins of Ger were discovered in Tris, Lycia A (Temple of Hera). Like the more famous “Monument of the Nereids” in Xanthus, the Lycian Heraion, created in the Hellenistic era, is a combination of a temple and a funerary monument to the ruler. Its architecture is a bizarre mixture of Greek and Eastern traditions. The high fence has a gate decorated with relief images of winged bulls. There was a sarcophagus inside. On the frieze along the perimeter of the fence there are reliefs made of painted limestone depicting dancers and musicians, episodes from ancient Greek myths (Yandex.Dictionaries › Dictionary of fine arts. - 2004-2009)
