Turkey
Yanartaş
Flames seep from bare rock on a dark hillside, burning without fuel since antiquity.
Flames flicker from bare rock on a dark mountainside, dozens of small fires burning with no visible fuel. The heat is real, hold your hand close and you feel it, but the stone itself is the source. At night the hillside glows with scattered orange light, just as it did when ancient sailors used these flames to navigate the Lycian coast.
Yanartaş, the Chimaera of antiquity, is a cluster of natural gas vents on a rocky slope above Çıralı on Turkey's Mediterranean coast. Methane seeps through the fractured serpentinite and ignites on contact with air, feeding flames that have burned continuously for at least 2,500 years. The Iliad places the fire-breathing Chimaera in Lycia, and the ancient world took these flames for the monster's breath. The main cluster sits at around 250 metres, reached by a stony uphill path from Çıralı, about half an hour's climb, and the fires are most dramatic in darkness, which makes the evening walk the standard approach. Below, Çıralı's beach is a loggerhead nesting shore, with the ruins of Olympos tangled in forest at the valley mouth.
Solo
The night walk to Yanartaş is best alone: torch off, forest path, then the surreal glow of eternal flames on rock. One of the most atmospheric short walks in Turkey, and the solitude sharpens every sense.
Couple
Climb at dusk, sit by the flames as the stars come out, and walk down through the forest in darkness. Paired with a Çıralı beach pension under the orange trees, it makes an evening neither of you will forget.
- The flames are fuelled by natural gas seeping through fractured serpentinite rock; no human maintenance.
- The Iliad places the fire-breathing Chimaera in Lycia, and these flames are widely held to be the myth's origin.
- Around twenty individual flame vents have been burning continuously for at least 2,500 years.
- The site is best after dark, when the blue-orange flames stand out against the unlit hillside.
Home-cooked aubergine dishes and fresh-caught fish under the citrus trees of Çıralı's pansiyons.
Breakfast pancakes with honey and kaymak cream, eaten within sight of the smouldering hillside.
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