Hiking in Turkey - Selge and Aspendos

Turkey offers many day hikes that combine moderate exertion with a journey into the past. We hiked along mountain paths that include parts of Roman construction once used in the Silk Road traffic.

With an early morning start, we drive to the Pamphylonian city of Selge – one of the most isolated and dramatic of ancient cities. The road narrows as we climb out of a narrow canyon, crossing Roman bridges. The pine forest gives way to chestnut, thorn and olive trees. The conglomerate rocks form lopsided towers, creating a vast, natural stone metropolis. We arrive at the village of Zelk (modern Selge), populated by formerly nomadic people. As we hike thru the village careful observation reveals many Roman columns and capitals and other architectural elements become raw building materials in stables and farm houses.

Starting at the impressive Roman theatre, we are joined by a local guide to explore the remains of the agora, acropolis and city walls. Then we hike down the valley, dropping almost 1000 feet. After about 10K we emerge from the Koprulu Kanyon at the ancient Roman bridge. We stop by the river for a lunch of local fresh fish, at a restaurant overlooking a mountain spring.

from Freya Stark:

Strabo mentions these bridges in the mountainous country which abounded with precipices and ravines and kept the Selgians from being ‘at any time or on any single occasion, subject to any other people’. This one joined two cliffs with one arch across the river far below and its road, cut in the precipice continuedto show itself at intervals, in slabs of stone placed end to end for miles into the hills.

.. here solitude floated up from the vertical gorges, filled with cypress or cedar as if with black spears. The silence buried the sound of its own waters, and a thin haze, spun in the blueness of air, divided one range from another, as if the heights wore haloes... Higher up the oak leaves lifted into sunlight, and their tyrunks, and those of a tall tree like a chesnut, stood furrowed like stone among the strange hieratic stones. These ribs of rock, symmetrically ranked, descended, one felt, into the hill’s foundations, and the bare rain-washed scaffolding that shows must be a part of the hidden scaffolding of earth. ... There was a human kindness about these trees; as there was in the floor of the road whose giant stones we kept on meeting, and in a cistern scooped solid through the rock at the rim of the cliff.. The symmetrical, natural rocks encircled this place and must have made it religious long before the days of known history or the knowledge of the Greeks. Small pointed hillocks were framed in these formal borders, and ... we reached a cemetery of stones and marble fragments scattered under high oak trees and saw the village now called Zerk .. scattered among prostrate columns under a Roman theatre in a hollow.

It was shallow as a saucer and the ploughed fields filled it and small pinnacles surrounded it, where temples had stood on easy slopes. Beyond them, the high peaks rose with unseen valleys intervening.

The town of Zelk lies today at the end of a winding road, but in ancient times was an integral part of trade on the Silk Road. It's a less visited place along the Aegeran Coast. The amphitheatre is in decent conidtion, except for the columns and blocks of stone that now form parts of stables and houses in the village below.Don't worry about a guide, as soon as you appear, local girls appear to show the ruins. They also just happen to have beautiful handicrafts they've made and you just might convince them to sell you one. From here, it's an easy hike down through narrow gorges and fragrant strawberry trees and osmanthis.

Nearby Aspendos is a day trip from Antalya and contains one of the best preserved Greek theatres. It's still used for performances.

Again, from Freya Stark:

The theatre stands on flat ground, like a box from which the lid has been lifted. Proud, limted and magnificent, there is a prison air about it – a difference as of death and life that one feels between the Roman and the Greek. No landscape stretches here beond a low and unobtrusive stage, for the easy coming and going of the gods. Human experience,that moved with freedeom and mystery, is here walled-in with balconies and columns; its pure transparency, the far horizon window, is lost.

In the Greek theatre, with its simple three-doored stage and chorus undertone of sorrow, the drama of life could penetrate, without any barrier between them, the surround vastness of the dark. I have listened to the Hippolytus of Euripides in Epidaurus where the words of Artemis and Aphrodite with the mountain pines and the sunset behind them, become a limpid fear – a play no longer, but nature and all that ever has been, anguis and waste of days, speaking to men.