Seleukeia (Lyrbe): the empty Roman city in the pine forest above Manavgat

Seleukeia is the ancient city near Side that almost nobody visits, and that is the entire point of going. Fifteen kilometres north of Manavgat, a kilometre above the village of Bucakşeyhler, a Hellenistic-Roman town sits in a pine forest with its two-storey market square still standing — and on most days you will have it to yourself.

It is not a polished site. There is no visitor centre, no café, no gate. You drive a narrow forest track, park where the track ends, and walk into a city that was only rediscovered in the early 1970s.

Seleukeia or Lyrbe?

You will see both names, and it is worth understanding why before someone tells you that you have gone to the wrong place.

When the ruins were rediscovered they were identified as Seleucia in Pamphylia, one of the cities founded around 300 BC by Seleucus I Nicator, Alexander’s general. That is the name on the road signs, in most guidebooks and in the memory of everyone in Manavgat. Later work on inscriptions from the site convinced most scholars that this is actually Lyrbe, a different Pamphylian town, and that Seleucia lay elsewhere. Academic sources and Wikipedia now file it under Lyrbe.

For a visitor it changes nothing about what you see. Ask for Seleukeia locally; read about Lyrbe if you want the scholarship.

What is left, and why it is worth the drive

The city had its best years in the 1st and 2nd centuries AD, and what survives is mostly from then.

• The agora is the reason to come. A colonnaded square with Doric columns still in place on two storeys, a row of shops behind the colonnade, and storage galleries underneath. Nothing else near Side gives you this sense of a Roman market square as a working space rather than a foundation plan.
• A small odeon off the south-east corner of the agora, six rows of seats cut into the slope — a council chamber or a small concert hall.
• A podium temple, small, with the base of a four-columned porch and a single inner room.
• City walls that reach nine metres in places, an aqueduct line, a mausoleum, Roman baths and a necropolis on the approaches, and the outlines of later churches.
• A mosaic floor still in situ. The famous one — the Seven Sages, with portraits of Solon, Thucydides, Lycurgus, Herodotus, Hesiod and Demosthenes, found in 1978–79 — was lifted and is in the Antalya Museum, which is closed for renovation at the time of writing.

Allow an hour and a half on site, more if you like to sit in a place like this. It is a site for looking and wandering, not for signage: there are few labels, so read this page or a guidebook before you go rather than expecting to be told what you are seeing.

Getting there

From Side you go back through Manavgat and north towards Bucakşeyhler. The tarmac ends at the village; the last stretch is a narrow forest track that is fine for an ordinary car in dry weather, driven slowly. There is no car park as such — you leave the car where the track gives out and walk.

It sits about 7 km from Manavgat Waterfall, so the two combine naturally into a half day: the waterfall early before the coaches, then up into the forest while it is still cool. Public transport will not get you here; it is own car, taxi, or a private day with a driver.

What to expect at an unattended site

Nobody is looking after you here, which is the charm and also the thing to plan for.

• Shade is patchy. The forest around the site is pine and pleasant; the agora itself is open to the sun. In July and August be there by 10:00.
• Footing is rough — collapsed masonry, tree roots, loose stone. Proper shoes, not sandals.
• Bring water and anything else you need. There is nothing to buy.
• No ticket booth in any account we trust, and usually nobody at all. A warden may appear in high season; have a little cash.
• Phone signal is thin under the trees. Download an offline map before you set off.

If you want ruins with a café and a guide, Perge and Aspendos are that. This is the other thing: a Roman town in a wood, quiet enough to hear the pine needles fall.