The 540-kilometer trail along the Turkish Mediterranean coast introduces hikers to the rich heritage of Lycia, an ancient maritime republic recognized as the first democratic community in the world.
"Lycians? But who were they?" said Iskender.
"When we Turks came here, we found only ruins, and - what do you call them? Where do the dead lie?" added the old shipbuilder, putting down the bottle of Efes beer and making a horizontal gesture with his hands.
"Tombs?" I added.
He adjusted his dirty cap and nodded.
- Murders Under the Flower Moon: How the Osage Massacres Were Almost Erased from American History
- The dark past of the man after whom Yale University is named: Who he really was
- All attacks in the history of the US Congress
- The transcontinental railroad that changed America forever and the "Great Wall of China" in the Sierra Nevada
It was only May, but the afternoon heat had already hit Simena, a remote village on the Teke Peninsula on Turkey's Mediterranean coast, a region historically known as Lycia.
I had been hiking for two weeks along the Lycian Way, a 540-kilometer trail that connects the cities of Fethiye and Antalya, and I met Iskender after seeking refreshment at a roadside cafe near the shipyard.
He pointed towards the jagged walls of Simena Castle, riding along the rugged ridge.
“Those tombs you saw near the castle. How did they move those huge stones thousands of years ago?" he asked.
"Not even five men could carry those grave covers.
Iskender shook his head, as if struggling to come to terms with the impossible idea."
From the fortress I saw Lycian sarcophagi with Gothic pike-shaped lids, which covered the hillside by the dozens.
Earlier, in nearby Kaleuchagiz, I climbed a hill overlooking the marina to find a vast necropolis of weed-covered tombs, while just a few meters away traders noisily set up their stalls.
The Turkish presence seemed fragile next to these eerie relics, a reminder that others once called this land home.
Immortalized in the Iliad as the land of the "twisting river Xanthos," named after its original capital, ancient Lycia was a mountain stronghold inhabited by a fiercely independent seafaring race whose origins remain a matter of conjecture.
The ancient Greek historian Herodotus claimed that the ancestors of the Lycians, Trmili, "descended from Crete," although modern scholars believe they were an Anatolian people who became Hellenized after Alexander the Great wrested the region from the Persians in 333 BC.
And although the Lycians disappeared into oblivion a long time ago, assimilated by the Byzantines and Turks, their political legacy remains, thanks to an unusual historical connection.
On June 30, 1787, future American President James Madison gave a speech at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.
The forum was convened to identify a more efficient system of government for the fledgling nation, where a lack of proportional representation hindered effective policy-making.
Responding to delegate Oliver Ellsworth's assertion that equality of vote had always been a basic principle in confederations, Madison cited the example of Lycia.
The Lycian League, he argued, was different.
Founded in the 2nd century BC and composed of 23 city-states, the Lycian League was the first democratic union in the world, a model of a strong confederation based on popular and proportional representation.
Six cities, including the capital Pataru, had three votes in the Lycian Council, medium cities had two, and small settlements had one.
Description: long distance hiking trail
- Length: 540 kilometers
- Duration: Approximately 30 days
- Start/Finish: Fethiye/Gejikbajiri (20 kilometers west of Antalya)
- Accommodation: Wild camps or guesthouses/hotels along the route
- Best time: March-May or September-November
The circumstances surrounding the creation of the league are unclear, but it was probably a response to the tyranny of Rhodes, who had been briefly granted control of Lycia by Rome in 190 BC.
The League could not determine foreign policy, but instead elected the executive, the Liquiarch, as well as local judges and collected taxes.
The 18th century French philosopher Montesquieu called it "the most perfect ancient constitution".
Professor Anthony Keane, a Lycian expert at the University of Notre Dame, describes the system as "a meeting of Greek ideas about democracy with pre-existing Lycian ideas about how a community of individual urban settlements worked together".
Many of the paths I walked were once roads, millennia-old arteries connecting the cities of Lycia, whose story ended after the Roman emperor Claudius annexed the region in 43 BC.
Interest in these ancient byways prompted British-born Kate Clough to create the Lycian Way in the 1990s after moving to the region.
"I wasn't inspired to make a track. I was inspired to find old ways," she said.
Clough continues to expand the route and support local communities: this year a volunteer group transformed a building in the village of Sidima into a cultural center.
There were few hikers on the Lycian Way, but the path was full of life: shaggy goats, heavy tortoises and, more alarmingly, black snakes that occasionally darted across the path.
In mountain villages covered with poppies and wild flowers, women in baggy shalwars brought me goat cheese, fresh honey and gozleme (flatbread), washed down with glasses of tea.
In the hottest hours, I plunged into the sea, hid in wooded canyons or stretched out in groves of oak, wild olives and dogwood with the scent of thyme.
After dusk, a thick silence would envelop the land, and my campfire would smolder beneath the whisper of the pines, as if inviting me to remember the men who built these roads.
Indeed, on the Lycian Way, memory is so pervasive that you walk, rest, and sleep in the company of phantoms. Despite its dramatic beauty, this is a land of ghosts.
In the book Lycian coast, an account of a sea trip along the peninsula in the 1950s, researcher Freya Stark called it "the most haunted coast in the world".
Empty graves lie in every thicket and grove, like silent emissaries sent from a missing embassy.
A prominent part of the Lycian urban fabric were the tombs, which were an expression of the central role of ancestor worship and the afterlife.
Strangest of all were the pillared tower tombs found in the ruins of Xanthos, the capital of Lycia under the Persians.
- The last speakers of ancient Sparta
- A Turkish underground city where 20.000 people lived
- An empire that the Aztecs could not conquer
The Lycian road turns inland to the site, which is located on a rocky hill surrounded by greenhouses and orange plantations.
The Acropolis is dominated by two columned tombs: the Tomb of the Harpies, decorated with reliefs of female winged figures, and the Xantian Obelisk, a huge stele covered with Lycian script that has not yet been fully deciphered.
The largest tomb of Xanthos, the Tomb of Paiavas, with reliefs and Lycian inscriptions, was removed in 1841 by the British archaeologist Sir Charles Fellowes, who took everything he could to London by ship HMS Beacon.
Today the tomb is in the British Museum, alongside the original friezes from the Tomb of the Harpies and the Nereid Monument, a spectacular sculptural tomb in the shape of a Greek temple.
From the 4th century BC onwards, the Lycians built rock-cut tomb "houses" - often burial chambers cut into the rock, with the rock around the neck cut to imitate the facade of a wooden Lycian house, complete with "timber" and projecting "beams".
The most common are sarcophagi, oblong tombs carved from Lycian limestone, usually placed on top of a lower grave.
Dr Catherine Draycott, an archaeologist from Durham University, explained that in Lycian tombs the deceased were buried in the upper sarcophagus, while relatives or slaves were buried in the chamber below.
"In Lycia there is an idea of literally raising important people in death," she said.
"So in that sense, they're heroizing whoever was laid there."
While the ubiquitous tombs have given archaeologists an understanding of the complex burial rituals of the Lycians, the picture of daily life is sparse: finds of personal items or jewelry are incredibly rare.
“The difficulty is that a lot of the hard evidence is Roman. It's so little from earlier periods," Draycott said.
Long ago looted, the tombs are inevitably empty - even the bones are gone.
- Mysteries of Vinča culture - what bothers scientists
- He returns home - an unreal adventure from one of the clay tablets of the Epic of Gilgamesh
- Julia's world - how women from the Balkans lived in ancient times
Two days after Xanthos, the road brought me back to the coast by the ruins of Patara, the capital of the Lycian League.
Once a thriving port, Patara was gradually abandoned after its river silted up.
The colonnaded main street now disappears into the basin, and the walls of the shops that once lined the avenue have long since collapsed.
The most important building here is the Council, or buleterion.
With a semicircular hall with 20 rows of stone benches, this recently restored assembly house was the political center of the Lycian League.
Sitting high in the bulleterion, it was not difficult to imagine hundreds of robed delegates debating public affairs while Lykiarchus presided over the proceedings, and my thoughts wandered from Patara to distant Philadelphia, and Madison's summons of the Lycian League.
Thanks to Madison, today the US House of Representatives is based on the Lycian principle, with 435 seats distributed among the 50 states in proportion to their population.
Of all the attempts of the Lycians to defy the passage of time and preserve themselves for the next world, the one that turned out to have a true afterlife was the most intangible thing - an idea.
Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube i Viber. If you have a topic proposal for us, contact us at bbcnasrpskom@bbc.co.uk
Bonus video:
