Four Ruins, No Ticket Office
Within forty minutes' drive of Demre there are four Lycian sites with no ticket office, no signage and, most days, nobody else in them.
Myra gets the coach parties, and it earns them — the theatre and the cliff tombs are the best-preserved pair of their kind in Lycia. But the district behind the town is full of other ancient settlements, and four of them are close enough and intact enough to be worth a morning: Kyaneai on its ridge above Yavu, Soura with its oracle spring beside the wetland, the stripped Heroon of Trysa above Gölbaşı, and the rock tombs of Istlada and Hoyran looking down on Kekova.
None of them is spectacular the way Myra is spectacular. What they offer instead is scale you walk through alone — and at Kyaneai and Istlada, carving as good as anything on the Myra cliff with nobody standing in front of it.
This guide covers what is actually left at each site, how to get there, how long to allow, and which one to choose if you only have half a day. For how these compare with the big Lycian League cities — Xanthos, Patara, Olympos — see Lycian cities compared.
None of these four sites has a ticket office, a guard, a toilet, a water tap or a marked path. Mobile signal is patchy at Kyaneai and Trysa. You need your own vehicle — no dolmuş goes to any of them — plus proper shoes, more water than you think you need, and an offline map. Tell someone where you are going. And don't attempt Kyaneai or the acropolis at Soura in the wet: this limestone turns to glass.
| Site | From Demre | Drive | Walk in | Allow | Go for |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kyaneai | 28 km · Yavu, on the Kaş road | 40 min | 30–40 min uphill | 2–3 hrs | 300+ sarcophagi along a ridge, a theatre, total solitude |
| Soura | 6 km · beside the Andriake wetland | 15 min | 10–20 min | 1.5–2 hrs | The fish-oracle spring and a standing Byzantine façade |
| Trysa | 18 km · above Gölbaşı village | 30 min | 20–25 min | 1–1.5 hrs | An empty enclosure with a famous absent frieze |
| Istlada & Hoyran | 20 km · on the Üçağız road | 35 min | 5–15 min | 2–3 hrs | House-type rock tombs and the Kekova panorama |
Kyaneai
Kyaneai runs along the crest of a ridge above the village of Yavu, 28 km from Demre on the Kaş road. It was never a large city — a single vote in the Lycian League — but it held a long ridge, and the people who lived there buried their dead along the whole length of it. The result is a necropolis you can walk through for twenty minutes without reaching the end: more than three hundred sarcophagi and rock-cut tombs, almost all unexcavated, most still standing where they were set.
The Greek name suggests kyanos, dark blue, usually explained by the colour of the local stone — though it is just as likely a Greek ear's version of an older Lycian name.
What you'll see at Kyaneai
The theatre is the set piece: around twenty rows cut into the slope, largely intact, with juniper and kermes oak pushing up through the seating and the mountains stacked behind it. Along the ridge are the city walls in massive ashlar blocks, cisterns, house foundations and the remains of a church.
But the tombs are the reason to come. They run the full length of the ridge — pointed-lid sarcophagi on plinths, chamber tombs cut straight into the rock face, and plain pigeon-hole graves by the hundred. Many carry Greek inscriptions, a few carry Lycian. Nothing is roped off and nothing is labelled, which is both the pleasure and the problem: it is entirely on you not to climb on them.
Getting to Kyaneai
Drive to Yavu and park in the village. The path up starts behind the houses and is not signposted — ask at the tea house and someone will point you at it. It is roughly 2 km and 30 to 40 minutes of steady uphill on a rough track, unshaded nearly the whole way.
Spring is the best time: the tombs stand in wildflowers and the climb is bearable. Avoid the middle of the day from June to September entirely — see when to visit Demre for the month-by-month picture.
From the theatre, take the ridge path left rather than doubling back. Ten minutes further on there is a run of sarcophagi most visitors never see, because they turn round at the theatre — and the view down over the Kasaba plain only opens up properly from there. A litre and a half of water per person is the minimum, and wear a hat: there is no shade anywhere on that ridge.
Soura
Soura — you will also see it written Sura, which is what the village is called — is the closest of the four to Demre and by some distance the strangest. It was not really a town. It was a sanctuary: the seat of an oracle of Apollo where the future was read in the behaviour of fish.
Ancient writers describe the ritual, and the description is oddly specific. Priests threw skewered meat into the spring beside the temple. What came for it, and how it took it, was the answer — certain fish meant one thing, others meant another, and a fish that seized the meat and carried it off meant something worse. People came from across Lycia to ask.
What's left at Soura
Three things, in three places, and you should see all of them.
Down on the flat ground beside the reed marsh are the foundations of the Apollo sanctuary and the spring itself, which still holds water for most of the year. In spring the ground around it is boggy and in high summer the reeds are over head height, so this is the part people most often skip.
Up the slope stands a ruined Byzantine church, its arched façade still clear of the hillside. It is the single best piece of standing architecture at any of these four sites, and evidence that the place mattered long after the oracle fell silent.
Above that is the acropolis: Lycian rock tombs cut into the outcrops, a pillar tomb with a pointed lid, freestanding sarcophagi — one of them with a lion carved on the lid — and inscribed stelae lying where they fell. From up there you can follow the wetland out to the sea at Çayağzı.
Getting to Soura
The turn-off is easy to miss: a dirt track on the right shortly before Sura village, coming from Demre. Park where the track widens. The climb to the acropolis is short but steep and loose.
Soura is also a stage on the Lycian Way through Demre — roughly an hour and a half on a marked coastal path from Andriake, and much the nicest way to arrive.
Go late in the afternoon. The church façade faces west and for about half an hour before sunset the light comes straight through the arch. And don't skip the walk down to the spring just because the ground looks rough — the oracle is the entire reason this place exists, and standing at the pool where people once came to ask their questions is worth muddy boots.
Trysa
Trysa is the one I send people to last, and only once they have done the others — because the thing that made it extraordinary is in Vienna.
In the 4th century BCE someone wealthy here built a heroon: a walled enclosure around a tomb, its inner walls carved with something like 150 metres of relief frieze. Amazons, centaurs, the Seven against Thebes, Theseus, Bellerophon, the sack of Troy, a hunt, a banquet. It was one of the richest sculptural programmes anywhere in Lycia, and it stood on a hilltop above a village of a few hundred people.
In 1881 and 1882 the Austrian archaeologist Otto Benndorf recorded the enclosure and had the entire frieze cut out and shipped to Vienna, where it has been in the Kunsthistorisches Museum ever since. Türkiye has asked for it back.
What's there now
The enclosure walls, close to their original height in places. The tomb itself. Foundations, sarcophagi, cut blocks lying in the grass, and a pine-covered hilltop with a long view over the plain.
That is genuinely all of it, and whether it is worth the drive depends on whether an empty frame moves you. It moves me — you can stand inside the enclosure and see exactly where each panel sat, at eye height, and the absence is the point. If that sounds like a thin reason to spend two hours, it is. Go to Kyaneai instead.
Getting to Trysa
The site sits above Gölbaşı village, about 18 km from Demre and roughly 30 minutes by road. Leave the car in the village and walk up through the pines — 20 to 25 minutes, and much gentler than Kyaneai. A GPS pin is more use than signs, because there are no signs.
The Trysa frieze has been in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna since the 1880s, and only part of it has ever been on permanent display. If you are going to Trysa, look up the panels before you leave the house. A few photographs on your phone turn the empty enclosure from a pile of stones into a room you can furnish.
Istlada
Istlada stands on the road toward Üçağız and Kekova, about 20 km from Demre, at the village of Kapaklı. It was a small farming settlement, never a League city, and that ordinary scale is exactly what makes it worth the stop: this is what most Lycians actually lived in, as opposed to the four or five cities everybody photographs.
What survives is the necropolis, and it is very good. House-type tombs are cut into the cliff with their façades carved to imitate timber construction — projecting beam ends, framed doorways, the pitched lids — all of it in stone, all of it copying a wooden house nobody has seen for 2,400 years. They sit at the edge of the village among olive trees, five minutes' walk from where you park.
Hoyran
Hoyran is the next ridge along, and the two are always visited together. It has its own tombs and sarcophagi and a handful of old stone village houses, but the reason to climb up is the view: the whole Kekova archipelago laid out below you — the long island, the channel, the bays, Üçağız tucked in behind them. It is the best free viewpoint in the district and there is usually nobody at it.
Allow two hours for the pair if you want the tombs and the view, three if you want to walk between them. The Lycian Way passes through here, so the path linking the two ridges is marked.
Getting to Istlada and Hoyran
Take the D400 toward Kaş and turn off for Üçağız and Kapaklı. The access lanes are narrow and partly unpaved, but a normal car manages them at a sensible speed. Park in the village rather than trying to drive up to the tombs.
It combines neatly with a boat trip: Üçağız is fifteen minutes further down the same road, so tombs in the morning and water in the afternoon makes a clean day.
The Hoyran viewpoint faces roughly south over the islands, so it is flat and hazy in the middle of the day and best in the first two hours after sunrise or the last hour before sunset. If you can only manage one of the two, take Istlada for the carving and Hoyran for the view — and if it comes to a straight choice, the carving is the rarer thing.
Which One Should You Go To?
If you only have half a day: Soura. Fifteen minutes from town, the best story of the four, and you can pair it with Andriake and Çayağzı beach without moving the car twice.
If you want the one that feels like a discovery: Kyaneai. It is the longest drive and the only real climb, and it is the one people write to me about afterwards.
If you are travelling with someone who doesn't much care about ruins: Istlada and Hoyran. The tombs take twenty minutes, the Kekova view buys back the rest of the goodwill, and lunch at Üçağız is close.
If you have already done the famous sites and want the strange one: Trysa.
If you have small children: none of them, honestly. The ground is uneven everywhere, there is no shade at Kyaneai or on the acropolis at Soura, and nothing is fenced. Demre's beaches are a better use of the day.
All four need a car — see getting to Demre for rental advice. If you would rather have the route worked out for you, Route 4 of our day trips guide strings Soura, Kyaneai and Istlada into a single day, and the interactive map shows where each one sits. More photographs of all four are in the gallery.