The ghost town that has stood empty for more than a century
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There’s a large and very dignified school in Kayakoy. There are narrow streets, lined with houses, that wend and rise up both sides of a steep valley. There’s an ancient fountain in the middle of the town. And there are churches, one with million-dollar hilltop views over the blue Aegean.
But, for most of the past 100 years, there have been no people.
Kayakoy, in southwestern Turkey’s Mugla Province, is a true ghost town. Abandoned by its occupants and haunted by the past. It’s a monument, frozen in time – a physical reminder of darker times in Turkey.
With hillsides dotted by countless crumbling buildings slowly being swallowed by greenery, and endless views into vanished lives, it’s also a fascinating and starkly beautiful place to visit. In summer, under clear skies and blazing suns, it’s eerie enough. Even more so in cooler seasons, wreathed in mountain or sea mists.
Just over a century ago, Kayakoy, or Levissi as it was known, was a bustling town of at least 10,000 Greek Orthodox Christians, many of whom were craftspeople who lived peacefully alongside the region’s Muslim Turkish farmers. But in the upheaval surrounding Turkey’s emergence as an independent republic, their simple lives were torn apart.
Tensions with neighboring Greece after the Greco-Turk war ended in 1922 led to both countries ejecting people with ties to the other. For Kayakoy, that meant a forced population exchange with Muslim Turks living in Kavala, in what is now the Greek region of Macedonia and Thrace.
But the newly arrived Muslims were reputedly less than happy with their new home, swiftly moving on and leaving Kayakoy to fall to ruin.