Pinara, Turkey – A Lycian City Carved into the Mountain

A City Beneath the Mountain

Some ancient cities announce themselves long before you reach them. Pinara does almost the opposite.

Hidden among the pine-covered foothills of Mount Cragus, today associated with Babadag in south-western Turkey, its ruins appear gradually through the landscape. Stone walls emerge between trees, paths disappear into vegetation, and fragments of buildings lie scattered across the slopes. Then the immense rock face comes into view, pierced by hundreds of ancient tombs, and the scale and strangeness of the place suddenly become apparent.

Around 40 kilometres from Fethiye and reached from the small village of Minare, Pinara feels removed from the well-known archaeological sites of Turkey’s Mediterranean coast. That relative isolation is part of its appeal. Antiquity has not neatly separated itself from the natural world here. Forest, mountain and ruins have grown together, and exploring Pinara feels less like walking through an archaeological park than discovering the remains of a city slowly being absorbed back into the landscape.

Among the Great Cities of Lycia

The city was known in the Lycian language as Pinale. An ancient tradition preserved by Stephanus of Byzantium, drawing upon the historian Menekrates of Xanthos, claimed that Pinara was founded when the population of nearby Xanthos became too large and a group of settlers established a new community on a high, rounded hill. The traditional meaning of the name, “round”, appears to reflect the distinctive form of the precipitous upper acropolis that still dominates the site.

Whatever the precise circumstances of its beginnings, Pinara developed into one of the most important cities of ancient Lycia. Strabo, writing during the age of Augustus and drawing upon the earlier geographer Artemidorus, describes the Lycian League as a federation in which the largest cities possessed three votes, medium-sized cities two, and smaller communities one. Pinara belonged to the privileged group of six leading cities, alongside Xanthos, Patara, Olympos, Myra, and Tlos.

There was mythology here as well as politics. Strabo records that Pandarus was honoured at Pinara, possibly identifying him with the Lycian figure associated with the heroic traditions surrounding the Trojan War. The connection is more than a curious fragment of mythology. It placed this remote Anatolian city within the wider imaginative world preserved by Greek literature and mythology, while still asserting a distinctly Lycian identity.

In 334 BCE, Alexander the Great entered Lycia during his campaign against the Persian Empire. Arrian records that after crossing the Xanthos River, Pinara, Xanthos, Patara and around thirty smaller towns surrendered to him. Pinara subsequently entered the shifting political world of the Hellenistic age before eventually flourishing under Roman rule.

A Lycian City in the Hellenic World

Alexander’s arrival did not suddenly transform Pinara from a Lycian into a Greek city. Its older identity remained deeply rooted, particularly in its funerary traditions, language, and extraordinary rock-cut necropolises. Yet during the centuries that followed, Pinara became increasingly woven into the Greek-speaking cultural world of the eastern Mediterranean.

This cultural convergence can still be traced among the surviving remains. Greek inscriptions appeared alongside the older Lycian language, demonstrating the increasing presence of Greek in the public and private life of the city. A Greek funerary inscription from the third century BCE, for example, invokes Leto and her children, revealing connections with the wider religious world of Lycia, in which Leto, Apollo, and Artemis held great importance.

Architecture provides another compelling expression of this Hellenic influence. Pinara’s theatre follows an essentially Greek plan, and unusually, appears not to have undergone the extensive Roman remodelling that transformed many theatres elsewhere in Asia Minor. Its design and position within the landscape preserve the traditions of Greek theatrical architecture with remarkable clarity.

Even the tombs reveal something of this gradual meeting of cultures. The ancient Lycian tradition of carving monumental tombs directly into the living rock remained unmistakable, yet some later tombs incorporated pediments and architectural forms reminiscent of Greek temples. Rather than one culture simply replacing another, Pinara reveals something much more fascinating: a Lycian city gradually absorbing elements of Hellenic mythology, language, religion, and architecture while retaining an identity firmly rooted in its own landscape and traditions.

The city continued to issue coins as a member of the Lycian League during the second and first centuries BCE. Roman rule later brought further development, and Pinara remained important long after the classical world had passed. Its continued existence into the Christian era is reflected in records of bishops of Pinara extending as late as the ninth century CE.

Yet chronology becomes almost secondary once you begin wandering through the ruins.

There was mythology here as well as politics. Strabo tells us that Pandarus, the celebrated Lycian archer of Homer’s Iliad, was honoured at Pinara. It is a tantalising connection between this remote Anatolian landscape and the heroic world of the Trojan War, precisely the kind of fragment that makes these ancient places feel larger than their surviving stones.

The Theatre and the Ancient City

Among Pinara’s surviving monuments, the theatre is one of the most impressive expressions of the city’s place within the Hellenic world. Standing beyond the main concentration of ruins and resting against the natural slope of a low hill, it seems almost to have grown out of the landscape. Even today, surrounded by forest and mountains, its great semicircle of stone remains remarkably complete.

The theatre is recognised as fundamentally Greek in conception and Hellenistic, both in its architectural form and in the way it is integrated into the natural landscape. Although its precise date of construction remains uncertain, it is generally associated with the Hellenistic period, possibly the late second century BCE. Its semicircular auditorium, orchestra, entrances and relationship with the hillside all follow established Greek theatrical traditions, while the absence of extensive later Roman remodelling has allowed much of that original character to remain unusually clear.

That survival makes the theatre particularly valuable at Pinara. Under Roman rule, theatres throughout the eastern Mediterranean were frequently enlarged or altered, with increasingly monumental stage buildings and other architectural changes transforming their original Greek form. At Pinara, the relationship between the auditorium, orchestra, entrances and surrounding hillside remained much closer to the older Greek theatrical tradition. The theatre therefore provides one of the clearest architectural reminders of how deeply Hellenic culture had become embedded within this originally Lycian city.

The stone seating, approximately 55 metres across, curves around an orchestra of about 14.5 metres in diameter. Twenty-seven rows of seats rise up the hillside and are divided by ten radiating stairways into nine wedge-shaped sections. Unusually, there is no diazoma, the horizontal passage that commonly divided the lower and upper sections of larger ancient theatres. Instead, the seating rises as a single, unified sweep of stone, giving the auditorium an especially harmonious appearance.

Its scale was considerable for a city such as Pinara. Estimates suggest that around 3,000 spectators could have gathered here, a reminder that theatre in the ancient Greek and Hellenistic world was far more than entertainment. Performances were embedded within civic and religious life, bringing citizens together for drama, music, ceremony, and communal celebration. At Pinara, a city already absorbing Greek language, mythology, and religious traditions, the presence of such a substantial theatre reveals another dimension of that cultural transformation.

The stage building has suffered far more than the seating, yet substantial remains survive. Parts of its walls still stand between approximately two and four metres high, and two doorways remain intact. One of these connected the parodos, the lateral passage through which performers and others entered the orchestra, with the stage area. The arrangement of the stage building is also unusual, with its front wall turning backwards at broad angles towards either side, helping to define the passageways leading into the theatre.

Perhaps most compelling, however, is the theatre’s relationship with the landscape. Greek theatres were traditionally integrated into natural slopes rather than imposed upon them as freestanding architectural masses, and Pinara preserves that relationship beautifully. The seating embraces the hillside while the theatre opens towards the wider landscape of Lycia. From its upper rows, the mountains and forest remain an inseparable part of the experience.

There is something particularly evocative about standing among those empty tiers today. A building once designed to concentrate thousands of voices now sits almost completely silent, its stone seats exposed to sunlight, wind and encroaching vegetation. In a city where nature has reclaimed so much of the ancient world, the theatre remains one of the rare places where the shape of communal life can still be understood immediately.

Pinara also contained a second, considerably smaller performance or assembly building on the western side of the lower acropolis, generally interpreted as a small theatre or odeon. Although poorly preserved, its presence alongside the principal theatre suggests a sophisticated civic centre with different spaces available for public gatherings, performances or political and cultural activities.

Beyond these buildings are the remains of the wider civic city: the agora, temples, baths, fortifications and lower acropolis. Many do not immediately reveal themselves. They must be searched for among towering trees, fallen masonry and broken ground, which is precisely what gives exploring Pinara its unusual character.

The city does not reveal itself all at once.

The Mountain of the Dead

But nothing quite prepares you for the necropolis.

The precipitous upper acropolis rises more than 450 metres above the ancient settlement, its face honeycombed with hundreds of tomb openings. Tomb after tomb was cut directly into the rock, many fashioned in the distinctive Lycian house form. Some occupy impossible positions high upon the cliff, turning the entire mountain into a monumental city of the dead overlooking the ruins below.

Among the finest is the so-called Royal Tomb, with a porch leading into the burial chamber and remarkable reliefs depicting fortified Lycian settlements. Elsewhere, rock-cut facades imitate the houses and monumental architecture of the living. These are not simply graves placed within the landscape. They have become part of the mountain itself.

Alone Among the Ruins

That extraordinary relationship between humanity and landscape is what has stayed with me most strongly at Pinara.

I have visited the ancient city twice, and on both occasions, I was the only visitor there. That solitude profoundly changed my experience of the place. There were no tour groups, distant conversations or footsteps other than my own; only the wind moving through the forest, the calls of birds and the immense silence of the ruins.

Walking deeper into the site was compelling, although at times strangely unsettling. Paths disappeared beneath vegetation; ancient walls emerged unexpectedly between trees, and the great rock face remained constantly above me, perforated by the dark openings of tombs. At times the wind seemed almost to carry stories through the branches, while the towering trees possessed a solemn presence of their own.

There were moments when I experienced the curious sensation of being watched. Not literally, but rather the feeling that the landscape retained something of the countless lives that had passed through it. The hundreds of tomb openings looking down from the mountain only intensified that sensation. It was haunting, yet never threatening.

Strangely, that feeling existed beside something entirely different: a profound sense of reverence.

That paradox came to define Pinara for me. The city felt haunting and peaceful, mysterious and contemplative at the same time. There was an awareness of death everywhere, yet also an extraordinary abundance of life. Trees rose through the ruins, vegetation pushed between ancient stones, birds moved through the forest, and the wind travelled across a city that had been abandoned for centuries.

When the Landscape Remembers

In many ancient cities, the surviving architecture dominates everything around it. At Pinara, the opposite seems true. The mountain towers over the city. Trees grow among walls. The forest encloses temples and tombs. Human civilisation is everywhere, yet nature has never surrendered the place.

Perhaps this is why Pinara affected me more deeply than many far more famous ancient cities. Its power does not depend upon grand avenues, reconstructed monuments, or crowds gathered around celebrated ruins. It lies in the intimacy of encountering an ancient city almost entirely alone, surrounded by forest, mountain, tombs and silence.

On both of my visits, there were moments when it seemed the boundary between the ancient city and the living landscape had almost disappeared. The ruins no longer felt like isolated remnants of history; they belonged to the mountain, the trees and the wind around them.

Pinara may never possess the fame of Ephesus or the monumental grandeur of some of Turkey’s better-known ancient cities. Yet beneath that extraordinary mountain of tombs, I found something perhaps more compelling: the haunting sense that this ancient Lycian city had never entirely vanished.

Its people were gone, but the landscape still seemed to remember them.

Click to view a selection of Pinara images