Slow Travel Guide

In short, this isn’t a place for people with mobility issues, unless you’re happy with a peek at the mindblowing necropolis rock and a relatively easy and flat walk to the theater. A narrow path – almost a goat track – takes you to the entrance of the cities’ necropolis, hidden behind a forest that could easily compete with an Alice in Wonderland set. Walking around the city, you’ll notice that there isn’t a lot of information to guide you, apart from the odd sign at the entrance, and another one along the main path between the theater and the acropolis. The information board at the entrance claims that when Xanthos was getting overpopulated, a group of elders founded a new city atop Mount Cragus, now Akdağ, and called it Pınara.

We’ve noticed that plenty of first-time travelers often make the same mistakes and decided to bundle them into this post with 10 Turkey travel mistakes & how to avoid them. Depending on which country issued your travel document, you may or may not need a visa to travel to Turkey. Picking the wrong resort is pretty high on the Turkey travel mistakes list, but so is underestimating distances and travel times in Turkey. There’s no need to invest in any fancy tools to calculate travel times between Turkish cities accurately; good old Google Maps is great at that.

We’ve already mentioned Gökbel Valley’s and the Menderes Massif’s extraordinary landscape and the Latmos Mountains in a few of our other posts. The 1.500-year-old frescoes painted on a cliff not too far away from the Adnan Menderes reservoir are part of those wonders, and we’ll tell you exactly how to find them in this post. Time to discover the spectacular boulders of Gökbel Valley, the legend of Marsyas, and these particular frescoes! There are no markings or signs anywhere, but the walk to the frescoes is rather short, so you should be fine as long as you’re wearing decent shoes and you keep following the track until you spot the rock with the frescoes.

The ancient city of Blaundos was none of those, though it features the largest known rock-tomb necropolis in Anatolia. Today, it is an active excavation site where new structures are unearthed regularly, making this a promising site to revisit from time to time. But today, it isn’t the Northern Temple that catches your eyes upon arrival; it’s the monumental city gate. To the south of the Colonnaded Street was a Basilica followed by a Public Building, the remains of which are now the most iconic image of the ancient city of Blaundos.