Off then for a brief respite on the coast – needed some breeze, and to smell the salt air after all that land-locked beauty. Actually, the whole point was to kayak for a day, so that is what I did. But traveling down to Olympus on the Mediterranean from Turkey’s center was no small affair, and it took an entire night on a bus, and pretty much all of the following morning to get down there.
But Olympus was breathtaking: gorgeous mountains, slightly bigger than the Crimean Mountains jutted straight up out of the coastline, framing a wild paradise and walling what little civilization thrived from the overzealous bustle of touristy, semi-Slavic Antalya nearby. And amongst the ramshackle beach hostels and faux “tree house” accommodation (they fancy themselves some sort of “Turk Family Ataturk” high up in the trees but really they’re just ground-level beach shacks!) sat the ruins of an ancient Classic city: befallen pillars, giant majestic archways and great tombs (like the pilfered one pictured here of a ship captain) strewn amongst the seaside forest. It occurred to me that Yalta might look like Olympus had it but the ruins of Sevastopol and been forgotten entirely by locals as too inaccessible to be a fun development endeavor.
I came across a massive archway in the forest and screamed with delight. This door to what once was a temple to Zeus is probably the most fantastic threshold to ancient Greek world that I have ever come across.
My kayaking day was splendid and I even fit in some snorkeling although I’d have top say that snorkeling back home on the Black Sea was a far more visually pleasing experience. It seems I spent a lot of time in Olympus comparing it to Crimea.
The history is similar though, like many maritime trading cities of the period, it was totaled many times by pirates and barbarian invaders.
On my only night in Olympus, I joined a nice Canadian couple on a trip to see “the Chimera” a span along a mountainside strewn, not with Hellenic ruins, but ancient fires that bellow out the undersides of rocks, burn in honor of the ages from the bowels of the earth for all eternity. I had never seen such an odd natural phenomenon. The flames are now no more than a foot or so high, but are they quite numerous and once were so big and bright that the seagoing ancients could navigate by them. Ironically, what saved the ships of civilized trade probably also guided the plundering hordes on nighttime raids.
I probably should have been thinking at that moment, looking out on the sea, the eternal fires and the night sky about the tenuous nature of civilization or about the dawn of time. But all I could think about was how I wished that I had brought some marshmallows.
