Kayaköy, also known as Lebessos and Lebessus and subsequently as Livissi, is a hamlet in southwestern Turkey located 8 kilometers south of Fethiye. The village, which was founded in the 1700s, was home to up to 20,000 Greek Orthodox citizens by the early twentieth century.
It was a Lycian city in ancient times, and Anatolian Greeks resided there until around 1922. The ghost town, currently maintained as a museum village, is made up of hundreds of decrepit but generally intact Greek-style buildings and churches that cover a small slope and serve as a rest stop for travelers visiting Fethiye and adjacent Lüdeniz.
The primary attraction is Kayaköy’s ghost town, which has hundreds of abandoned dwellings with no roofs or windows and partially collapsed walls. It had a population of around 2,000 people in 1900, nearly all Greek Christians; it is now deserted save for tour groups and roadside merchants selling homemade products. There are, however, a few residences that have been renovated and are being occupied. Kayaköy was formerly densely inhabited enough to sustain a local newspaper as well as multiple schools and shops.
Livissi is most likely the location where the residents of Byzantine Gemiler Island fled to avoid pirates. After adjacent Fethiye (known as Makri) was damaged by an earthquake in 1856 and a devastating fire in 1885, it witnessed a revival. In the hamlet and the plain, more than 20 churches and chapels were erected (Taxiarhes – the ‘Upper’ church – and ‘Panayia Pyrgiotissa’ – the ‘lower’ church – St. Anna, St. George, and so on). The majority of them are still standing in a dilapidated or semi-ruinous state. According to Greek and Ottoman records, the settlement had a population of over 6000 people.
Kayaköy has already been abandoned before the conclusion of the Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922). Persecutions of Livissi residents and adjacent Makri Greeks were part of a larger campaign against all Ottoman Greeks and other Christians across the Empire.
Persecutions in the area began in Makri in 1914. In 1916, a letter in Greek addressed to Sir Alfred Bilotti, the British Consul General in Rhodes, recounted the killings and persecution of Livissi and Macri Greeks and requested that he act. Unfortunately, Turkish officials intercepted the mail at Livissi. Later that year, numerous Levissi families were deported and forced to walk 220 kilometers to Denizli. They were subjected to a variety of horrors and tortures, including death.
In 1917 and 1918, there were two further periods of exile. Families were moved to villages surrounding Denizli, such as Acpayam, during a fifteen-day forced march in 1917, comprising primarily of the elderly, women, and children who had stayed in the region. During the death march, the roadways were littered with the remains of children and the elderly who died from starvation and exhaustion. The following year’s banishment was no less brutal. In September 1922, the few remaining Greeks of Livissi and Makri left their houses and set sail for Greece. In Attica, some of them established Nea Makri (New Makri).
The 1957 Fethiye earthquake destroyed several of the abandoned structures. Kayaköy village now functions as a museum and historical monument. Around 500 remnants remain and are protected by the Turkish government, including two Greek Orthodox churches, which are the most important sites of the ghost town. There is a private museum dedicated to the town’s history. A fountain from the seventeenth century lies in the center of the settlement. UNESCO designated Kayaköy as a World Friendship and Peace Village.
The Turkish government announced intentions to develop the town on September 9, 2014. It intends to provide a 49-year lease that will “partially open Kayaköy’s archeological site to building,” as well as the “construction of a hotel and tourism amenities that will occupy one-third of the hamlet.”
The majority of the villagers were skilled artisans. Tourism is currently the most significant economic activity in the area. The community is expected to be largely restored.