Kayaköy Village
Located in a corner of Fethiye, Kayaköy offers a mystical atmosphere with its abandoned Greek houses and streets.
This village offers its visitors a historical journey opportunity by carrying the traces of the forgotten past.
You can find a hiking destination through which you can see the ruins of a Greek settlement abandoned in 1923 when the governments of Turkey and Greece mandated population swaps. The ruins also features some well-preserved structures, including a church.
If you follow the mountain road heading south from behind the historical Fethiye Castle, 7 km away you will reach a charming settlement where Anatolian Greeks lived until 1922. In the past, Kaya Village was called “Levissi”. In 1922, according to a population exchange agreement between the two countries, Thracian Turks and Anatolian Greeks were exchanged, but the Thracian immigrants who came to this region could not adapt to the environmental conditions and left the village in a short time. Since 1923, Kaya Village has been welcoming its visitors with the appearance of an abandoned “ghost town”.
In the summer of 2000, the restoration began for the village’s two large churches, a school and a few residences as part of a project carried out by the Association of Turkish Travel Agencies and the Chamber of Architects of Turkey. Kaya Village, with its churches, chapels, schools, fountains, workshops, hospital and library, as well as thousands of abandoned houses, is still under consideration to be preserved as a cultural asset after restoration and to be used as an international “friendship and peace village”.
