History of Demre
2,500 Years in the Making

Every town has a history. Demre has five — stacked on top of each other, sometimes literally. A Lycian city-state buried under Roman prosperity, a Roman harbour buried under river sediment, a bishop’s church buried under centuries of neglect, and all of it now flanked by plastic greenhouses that feed the nation. This is the story of a place that keeps reinventing itself while its past refuses to stay underground.

Lycian Origins — The Birth of Myra

The story of Demre begins not with that name, but with Myra — one of the most powerful city-states of ancient Lycia. By the 5th century BCE, Myra was already significant enough to carve monumental tombs into the cliff faces above its river plain, the earliest physical evidence of a settlement that would endure for millennia.

Lycia occupied a mountainous strip of southwestern Anatolia, roughly between modern Fethiye and Antalya. Unlike the empires that surrounded it, Lycia governed itself through a federation — the Lycian League — that is now recognised as one of history’s earliest experiments in representative democracy. Each member city received one, two, or three votes in the federal assembly based on its size and importance. Myra held three votes — the maximum — placing it alongside Xanthos, Patara, Pinara, Olympos, and Tlos as one of the League’s six most powerful cities.

Myra’s wealth came from two sources: fertile agricultural land on the river plain and maritime trade through its harbour at Andriake, five kilometres to the southwest. The harbour connected Myra to the broader Mediterranean trading network — grain from Egypt, olive oil from Greece, timber from the Taurus Mountains. The rock-cut tombs that still dominate the cliff face above the town are monuments to this prosperity: only wealthy families could commission the elaborate carved facades that imitate Lycian wooden architecture and Greek temple fronts.

The tombs are Myra’s most recognisable feature today — over a hundred carved chambers in two separate groups, the River Necropolis and the Sea Necropolis. Some preserve traces of the original painted decoration that once covered their facades in vivid red, blue, and yellow. For a detailed guide to the tombs’ architecture, symbolism, and best viewing spots, see our dedicated article on the Lycian rock-cut tombs of Myra.

Rome, St. Paul & the Bishop Who Became Santa Claus

Rome absorbed Lycia in 43 CE, and Myra entered its most prosperous period. The city’s theatre — a 10,000-seat semicircle carved into the hillside — was expanded and adorned with elaborate stone masks and friezes. But it was Andriake harbour that made Myra strategically vital to the empire. Rome depended on Egyptian grain to feed its capital, and the sea route from Alexandria to Italy passed directly through the Lycian coast. Andriake became a mandatory stopping point — ships transferred cargo, waited for favourable winds, and restocked provisions.

In 129 CE, Emperor Hadrian visited the region personally and commissioned a colossal granarium at Andriake — a seven-room warehouse measuring 2,307 square metres, large enough to store grain for the entire eastern Mediterranean fleet. An inscription above the entrance, still readable today, records Hadrian’s patronage. The granary’s scale tells you everything about Myra’s importance to Rome: this was not a provincial backwater but a linchpin of the empire’s food supply chain.

Around 59 CE, a prisoner named Paul of Tarsus — the apostle Paul — stopped at Andriake harbour while being transported to Rome for trial. The Acts of the Apostles records the moment with characteristic brevity: “And there the centurion found a ship of Alexandria sailing into Italy; and he put us therein” (Acts 27:5-6). Paul changed ships at the harbour that Hadrian would later monumentalise — the same quay where fishing boats and Kekova tour boats dock today.

But it is another figure — born a generation before the Roman Empire became Christian — who would make this town known to the entire world. Nicholas was born around 270 CE in Patara, a coastal city sixty kilometres west of Myra, to a wealthy Christian family. When his parents died in an epidemic, he gave away his inheritance to the poor. He became Bishop of Myra in his thirties and served for approximately three decades, surviving imprisonment under Emperor Diocletian’s persecution and attending the Council of Nicaea in 325.

The legends that grew around Nicholas — secret gifts of gold coins to save three sisters from poverty, miraculous provision of grain during a famine, the calming of a deadly storm at sea — became the foundation for the figure the world would come to know as Santa Claus. He died in 343 and was buried in a church built over his grave in Myra’s town centre. That church, rebuilt and expanded over the following centuries, still stands today — the most visited site in Demre.

The Catastrophe — Earthquakes, Raiders & the Stolen Relics

The centuries after Nicholas’s death brought crisis upon crisis. In the 2nd century CE — the exact date is debated among scholars, with estimates ranging from the 2nd to the 4th century — a series of powerful earthquakes struck the Lycian coast. The most dramatic consequence occurred at Kekova, thirty-five kilometres from Myra: the southern shoreline of the settlement known as Dolichiste sank into the Mediterranean, submerging houses, stairways, harbour walls, and water cisterns. These ruins, visible beneath the clear water to this day, make Kekova one of the most remarkable underwater archaeological sites in the Mediterranean.

From the 7th century, Arab naval raids devastated the coast. The church of St. Nicholas was damaged in raids in 808 and again in 1034. Emperor Constantine IX Monomachos ordered its restoration in 1043, adding defensive walls — a church that needed fortification tells you how dangerous the coast had become. Andriake harbour, once bustling with Egyptian grain ships, began silting up as alluvial deposits from the Demre River (ancient Myros) choked the bay.

The most traumatic event in Demre’s collective memory occurred in 1087. A group of merchants from the Italian city of Bari — some accounts call them merchants, others pirates — broke into St. Nicholas’s sarcophagus and removed the majority of his bones. The relics were transported to Bari, where they remain today in the Basilica di San Nicola. A smaller portion was later taken to Venice. A fragment held in the Antalya Archaeological Museum is believed to be genuine. The question of whether the relics should be returned has been raised repeatedly by Turkish authorities — most recently in 2009 — but Italy has never agreed.

Quiet Centuries — From Empire to Village

The Seljuk Turks took control of the Lycian coast in the late 12th century, and Ottoman rule followed in the 15th. For Myra — now increasingly known by its Turkish name Kale (“castle”) — these transitions marked not dramatic rupture but slow, quiet decline. The grand public buildings fell into disrepair. The theatre filled with rubble and vegetation. The tombs, already ancient, became simply part of the landscape — useful as goat shelters, their painted facades fading in the sun.

The most insidious enemy was not military but geological. The Demre River carried silt from the Taurus Mountains year after year, century after century, depositing layer upon layer of alluvial sediment across the river plain. The ancient city was slowly buried. By the 19th century, metres of earth covered Myra’s streets, its agora, the lower tiers of its theatre. The harbour at Andriake, once deep enough for Roman grain ships, had become a shallow marsh. The church of St. Nicholas sat below the rising ground level, water seeping into its foundations.

What remained was a small farming and fishing community, disconnected from the cosmopolitan world that had once passed through its harbour. The 1923 population exchange between Turkey and Greece — part of the Treaty of Lausanne — removed the town’s remaining Greek Orthodox community, the direct spiritual descendants of the congregation Nicholas had served sixteen centuries earlier. The church lost its last worshippers. Demre entered the 20th century as an obscure agricultural village, its extraordinary past literally buried underfoot.

It was European travellers who began to pull Demre’s past back into view. Captain Francis Beaufort mapped the coast in 1811-12 and identified the ruins at Myra. Sir Charles Fellows explored the site in 1838, publishing detailed drawings that astonished London. Thomas Abel Brimage Spratt and Edward Forbes conducted systematic surveys in the 1840s. Their work initiated a slow process of excavation and recognition that continues to this day.

The Greenhouse Revolution

The event that shaped modern Demre more than any archaeological discovery was not ancient at all. In the 1960s, local farmers learned about plastic greenhouse technology being used in the Netherlands and began to experiment. The Demre valley offered near-ideal conditions: a flat plain at sea level, more than 300 days of sunshine per year, mild winters buffered by the Taurus Mountains to the north, and ample water from the river that had once fed Myra’s harbour.

The results were transformative. Within two decades, the open fields where farmers had grown grain and grazed livestock were covered with plastic-roofed greenhouses. Tomatoes, peppers, aubergines, and cucumbers could now be grown year-round, producing multiple harvests where traditional farming yielded one. The “Demre tomato” became a recognised name in Turkish produce markets. The region’s economy shifted from subsistence agriculture to industrial-scale vegetable production — and with it came cash, construction, and a population boom.

The physical transformation was startling. Viewed from the mountains above — or from the road approaching from Finike — the Demre plain now appears as a vast sheet of white plastic stretching from the mountain foothills to the coast, broken only by the town centre and the archaeological sites. It is not beautiful in a traditional sense. But it is extraordinary: here is an ancient Lycian plain, where Roman senators’ grain was loaded onto ships, where a saint walked the streets — and it is now one of the most productive vegetable-growing regions in the eastern Mediterranean.

The greenhouse revolution also created tensions that persist today. Expanding agricultural operations sometimes encroach on areas with archaeological potential — construction work regularly unearths ancient fragments, and the line between farmland and protected zone requires constant negotiation. Water resources are under increasing pressure, with both greenhouse irrigation and urban demand drawing from the same aquifers. A younger generation, educated in cities, shows less enthusiasm for the gruelling physical work of greenhouse farming, raising questions about the industry’s future workforce. See our full article on Demre’s greenhouse culture and agricultural life.

Modern Demre — Layers Upon Layers

Today’s Demre is a town of about 25,000 people living at the intersection of deep history and pragmatic modernity. The Tuesday dolmuş to Antalya passes the Roman theatre. The electricity pylons cross a valley that Hadrian surveyed. The Friday market sells tomatoes grown in fields that were once part of a Lycian necropolis. Nothing here is purely ancient or purely modern — everything is layered.

Archaeological work continues at every major site. At Myra, Hacettepe University has conducted excavations for decades, gradually uncovering the theatre’s lower tiers and agora from beneath centuries of alluvial deposit. At St. Nicholas Church, the “Legacy for the Future” project led by Doç. Dr. Ebru Fatma Fındık made headlines in December 2024 with the discovery of a limestone sarcophagus beneath the church floor — potentially the original burial vessel of St. Nicholas, predating the one raided in 1087. At Andriake, the Lycian Civilizations Museum opened in 2016 inside Hadrian’s restored granary, bringing 1,476 artefacts into a building that is itself a 2,000-year-old exhibit.

Kekova, too, has gained fresh recognition. The bay was declared a Specially Protected Area in 1990 — one of Turkey’s first — prohibiting diving and swimming in the sunken city zone. In 2025, the village of Üçağız (ancient Teimiussa), which serves as the departure point for Kekova boat tours, was selected as a UNWTO Best Tourism Village, an international acknowledgement of the region’s unspoilt character.

Tourism is growing but has not yet overwhelmed Demre the way it has Cappadocia, Ephesus, or the Turkish Riviera’s resort towns. There are no five-star hotels, no cruise-ship terminals, no all-inclusive complexes. Whether this is a limitation or a virtue depends on the visitor — but it is certainly a defining characteristic. Demre’s identity remains rooted in agriculture, not hospitality. The town has not yet had to choose between its farming character and a tourist economy, and that tension — or balance — may be the most interesting chapter of its history still being written.