Day trips from Antalya: the Roman cities

Aspendos · 45 km

If you only do one trip, do this one. The theatre was built in the 2nd century under Marcus Aurelius and survives almost entire: seating for more than fifteen thousand and, above all, the stage wall still standing, which is exactly what almost never survives in a Roman theatre. Walking in and finding the building closed around you is not like any other ruin.

It’s still a working theatre: it hosts the opera and ballet festival, and the acoustics do what people claim.

Behind it, out in the fields, stand the piers of the aqueduct that brought the city its water.

Perge · 18 km

The closest one, and the one that reads most clearly as a city: you cross it along a colonnaded street hundreds of metres long with a water channel running down the middle, between the Hellenistic gate with its two round towers and the foot of the acropolis. The stadium survives too, among the best anywhere.

It’s the museum’s companion, not an alternative: nearly every statue in the halls of gods and emperors came out of here. Doing it in this order (Perge first, museum after) makes both visits better. St Paul passed through this city on his first journey, according to Acts.

Termessos · 30 km

The odd one out and the best if you’ve already seen ruins: a Pisidian city perched on a mountain inside a national park, which Alexander the Great besieged in 333 BC and failed to take. He looked at the position and left: it’s one of the few defeats on his record.

Its theatre hangs over a precipice with the mountains opposite, and it’s probably the most spectacular view on the whole coast. The price: a serious uphill walk in the heat with no shade, and ruins half-eaten by the forest.

Not a flip-flops trip.

Side · 75 km

A village built literally inside an ancient city: the houses and shops sit among the ruins, and at the end of the peninsula the columns of the 2nd-century temple of Apollo still stand with the sea behind them. At sunset it’s the photo of this coast. It also has an enormous theatre, one of the largest in the region. The catch is that Side is heavily touristed and in high season the main street is a corridor of shops: going early or late fixes it.

Olympos and the Yanartaş · 80 km

Two things in one place. Olympos is a Lycian and Roman city sunk into woodland that runs down to the beach: the ruins are among the trees and the river, not on bare ground, and the walk ends with a swim.

On the mountain next door is Yanartaş: dozens of flames coming out of the ground on their own, natural gas seeping through the rock, burning since antiquity. The Greeks explained them with the myth of the Chimaera.

It’s a climb, and it has to be at night: by day you can’t see them.

Phaselis · 55 km

The trip where you don’t choose between ruins and beach: Phaselis was a Lycian port with three inlets, and today the ancient main street runs from one harbour to the next through pine woods, with clear water on both sides. You swim where the ships tied up. It isn’t the most monumental city on the list, it has its theatre and its aqueduct, but it is the most pleasant, with Tahtalı, 2,365 metres, filling the background. With kids or in the heat, this is the one.