Story
The story of Xanthos
According to Homer's Iliad, the Lycian leaders Glaucus and Sarpedon, who fought in the Trojan War, came from the lands of the Xanthos River, and Achilles' immortal talking horse was also called Xanthos. This ancient city at Kınık village near Kaş was once the capital of Lycia and is now a UNESCO World Heritage site; its name is thought to come from the Greek word for "yellow". It stands on two hills above the plain: look for the walled Lycian acropolis rising like a steep crag from the Eşen stream, and the higher, broader Roman acropolis to the north.
In 545 BC Persians under Harpagos took the city. Historians tell how Xanthos was razed or burned many times, only to rise again from its ashes. In 168 BC it became the administrative and religious capital of the Lycian League.
Seek out its rock tombs, sarcophagi and pillar tombs. Charles Fellows, who first explored the site in 1838, carried the Nereid Monument off to the British Museum in the 1840s.
This story is compiled from Wikipedia and other open sources; dates and numbers are checked against the source. The text is shared under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence. Source ↗
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