Lycian Turkey is fourth in George E. Bean's sequence of well-known guides to south-west Turkey from Pergamum to Alanya. Despite great changes in recent years, Lycian continues to be the least accessible and least visited part of the region. Excavations starting in the 1960s have though gradually uncovered some of the important sites.
Locked away in their mountainous and beautiful country, the ancient Lycians, with their own distinctive language and script, maintained a fierce independence. Lycians appear in the Illiad as allies of the Trojans. They had periods of subjection to Persia and the Ptolemies, and formed their own Lycian League. They were the last people of Asia Minor to be incorporated into the Roman Empire.
Although early buildings are overlaid by those of the Hellenistic and Roman periods, the Lycian tombs, a feature of nearly every site, remain. AMopng the sites of Myra, with its church of Santa Claus; Xanthus, at all times the greatest city of Lycia; and Arycanda, the character of whose profligate and slothful inhabitants 'did not match the beauty of their surroundings'.
Professor Bean's guides, equipped with helpful maps and plans and illustrated with magnificent photographs, have never been superseded and are essential to travellers interested in Turkey's ancient sites.