Kaş is where Türkiye goes to break its freediving records, because the seabed falls past 100 metres within a 300-metre swim of the town beach. There is no current and almost no swell, so a rope can be dropped straight into the deep: Şahika Ercümen has set world records on these lines, and the CMAS freediving world championship was held here in October 2022. That same steep seabed keeps older things. In 1982 a sponge diver sketched what he described as metal biscuits with ears; nine kilometres southeast of the harbor, 44 to 52 metres down, archaeologists found the merchant ship those ingots came from — a vessel that sank around 1320 BC carrying ten tonnes of copper and a tonne of tin, roughly the ratio bronze is mixed from, along with glass ingots and goods from nine or ten cultures. The town above it stands on the Lycian city of Antiphellos and never cleared it away, so sarcophagi still sit at street corners.
There is no beach resort here and never has been. People swim off pebble coves and ladders bolted into the rock, into water that stays clear right at the edge of town, and the lanes above are whitewashed and hung with bougainvillea, running down to a working harbor where dive boats and the little ferry to the Greek island of Meis share one quay — the crossing takes about twenty minutes, and the island is close enough to pick out the colour of its houses. Walk five minutes west and a Hellenistic theatre of twenty-six stone rows faces the open sea instead of a hillside, which is rare in Anatolia. The coast is now the protected Kaş-Kekova area; the Uluburun cargo went to a museum in Bodrum, and divers visit a replica of the wreck laid on the seabed instead.