The place exists on its own terms, without boutiques, bars or interpretive centre, where subtler pleasures include clocking the casual ways in which ancient Heraclea's stones have been customised by present-day Kapıkırı – as garden tables and as tether posts for donkeys. In most of Turkey's ancient cities a museum service in thrall to the tidying tendency has cleared away rustic communities. Heraclea has been left to Kapıkırı's farmers and fishing folk to picturesque effect. I walked among ruined colonnades and temples, tottering arches and ashlar tiers, and scattered blocks of carved frieze to find myself among the makeshift stone cottages and tended kitchen gardens of the site's present-day occupants. ![]() Complete with parapets, posterns and ramparts, they date from the third century BC. I shoved my canoe in among the faded fishing caïques with their high prows and looked beyond the beach to where a magnificent set of city walls rises from olive groves around the ancient harbour city of Heraclea. This glorious beach could have been a shoe-in for sun loungers and parasols, but it lay deserted except for a shawled villager who had been collecting the driftwood now stacked on the back of her donkey. ![]() ![]() I paddled down the pristine lake within its hem of hazed mountains, passing island heronries topped by the crumbling crenellations of fortified Byzantine monasteries, and ran my canoe ashore on Seychellois-white sands of powdered shell.
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