Imagining history

There was a fairy-tale life in Kekova, one of the biggest trade regions of the Aegean region. Once upon a time, Kekova was filled with laughter as usual and spent their days going to theatres and Roman baths. Kekova was also filled with dazzling castles. temples that surrounded the castles like pearls. However, on one August day, the people awoke to the violence of the earth. Earthquakes, which even the gods could not prevent, brought the end of many cities in a short time. The people of Kekova were very religious, so many did not want to leave the island. The public thought to write a rebirth story against their own suffering. They did not yet know the sad ending that awaited them, as they did not take into account mother nature. Giant tsunami waves had hit the shores of Antalya and had already swallowed some cities like Myra, Simena and Patara without mercy. The city with a glorious past sank under dark and cold waters, alone, uninhabited, and in ghostly silence. Only a few military structures and tombs carved into the rocks on the land remained from the ancient city.

Prior to all this, Kekova didn’t just offer vast turquoise water with great depth. Kekova was attracting adventurers and merchants with its reach to Lycia: the land of lights. So much so that this island, which was a favourite of even the Byzantine and Roman empires in history, has been the subject of many wars in history. Kekova, which resembles a paradise like the ancient cities of Simena (Kaleköy), Teimissa (Üçağız) and Aperlai, in particular, continues to impress its visitors with its untouched beauty by hosting cultural and historical traces from the Middle Ages to the present. Kekova was even more recently the subject of a dispute between Italy and Turkey; however, it was assigned to Turkey in 1932. Kekova is an open-air museum!