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Kayak\u00f6y is a village in Turkey\u2019s Mu\u011fla province, about 8 km from Fethiye and 9 km from \u00d6l\u00fcdeniz, and it holds the country\u2019s most evocative abandoned settlement: hundreds of roofless stone houses climbing the hillside \u2014 the remains of Levissi<\/strong>, the Greek Orthodox town emptied by the 1923 population exchange. The ruins are now an open-air museum run by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism and take two to three hours to walk. But Kayak\u00f6y is more than ruins. At their foot is a living village; around it run Lycian Way paths, a swimming bay you reach on foot, stone-courtyard restaurants, and a night sky dark enough for the Milky Way. This guide gathers everything you need to plan a visit on one page, with links to our deeper articles under each heading. The people writing it live here; the distances and opening hours are checked on the ground.<\/p>\n In this guide<\/strong><\/p>\n Kayak\u00f6y sits behind the ridge that separates Fethiye from \u00d6l\u00fcdeniz, at the edge of a plain ringed by pine forest. Its ancient name was Karmylassos<\/strong>; its Greek name was Levissi<\/strong>. What sets it apart is scale: not a single abandoned lane but the skeleton of an entire town \u2014 two churches, scattered chapels, a school building and fountains covering the slope. In the late-afternoon light the stone turns the colour of honey, and directly below the ruins the living village of Kayak\u00f6y carries on: vineyards, breakfast gardens, restaurants. Most visitors come over from \u00d6l\u00fcdeniz for half a day. Those who stay get the part the day-trippers never see \u2014 the silence of the mornings and the depth of the night sky.<\/p>\n Levissi was a Greek Orthodox town of thousands, known for its craftsmen, through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; Turkish farmers worked the plain below, and the two communities lived side by side. In 1923, under the population exchange agreed at Lausanne, Levissi\u2019s Greek inhabitants were sent to Greece. The exchange families who arrived preferred the farmland of the plain to the houses on the slope, so the town stood empty, and the 1957 Fethiye earthquake left most of its buildings roofless. The full story \u2014 daily life in Levissi, the days of the exchange, and the village\u2019s afterlife in fiction \u2014 is in our article on the full story of 1923<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n
Where Kayak\u00f6y is and why it matters<\/h2>\n
A short history: from Karmylassos to today<\/h2>\n
How to get to Kayak\u00f6y<\/h2>\n