At home and abroad

If YOU heard about a place where a Greek god had battled with and slain a female monster and, commemorating this victory, the mountain spouted flames — and they had continued burning for more than 2000 years… would you be able to resist going to see it? I couldn’t. The burning mountain is Mt. Chimaera; it’s near the towns people stay in before embarking on an sailing trip along Turkey’s Turquoise Coast.

Steve and I wanted our adventure here to include some time on the water. So after leaving Ephesus, we flew to Antalya on Turkey’s southern Mediterranean coast. We spent a night in its historic core, so picturesque it made Steve blurt out, “This makes Carmel look like a dump!” Then we took a taxi Friday morning to a backpacker joint in Olympos, about 90 minutes southwest of Antalya. I’d read that nightly excursions to the Chimaera would be available, but when we checked in, the affable manager sadly said, due to Covid, these were sporadic. Not many Turks were interested, and foreign tourism, though recovering, was a shadow of its former self. He said he would let us know that evening if a group could be mustered. If so, it would cost 100 lira (about $6.50) apiece.

I felt disappointed, but Olympos isn’t a bad place to chill. A couple of blocks from where we were staying, there were beautiful ancient ruins. The pleasant path that winds among the crumbling stone structures leads to a beach fronting turquoise water. Though the beach was too rocky and the water too chilly to tempt me to plunge in, the scene was archetypally picturesque.

When dinner back at the camp began at 8, we hadn’t heard a peep about the pyro-nocturnal excursion.I’d given up, but Steve wanted to double check. He was all but panting when he came back with the news that a van would be leaving in just 15 minutes, promptly at 9 pm. We threw our walking sticks and sweaters and flashlights into the daypack, then piled on the vehicle, happy to find another couple already aboard. We picked up two more couples at a nearby hotel, then barreled into the darkness.

If you ever go to Turkey and want to see the famous fires yourself, here’s my advice: stay in the town of Cirali, not Olympos. Only a half mile of shoreline separates the two towns, but the deep ravine between them complicates vehicular transit. You have to drive up the twisty mountain road for 20 minutes, go south on the highway for a minute or two, then zoom downhill again to the neighboring town. On the far side of Cirali, we climbed for another 5-10 minutes before reaching a parking lot where the 8 of us piled out of the van.

It was 9:45 pm. In limited English, our driver said we had to be back by 11. The other three couples (all in their 20s and 30s) bolted up the stony path into the dark, disappearing from view almost immediately. Steve and I opened our poles and took off after them as fast as possible.

I’m glad we’re reasonably fit and that we had the poles and flashlights. In the daylight, the hike up the mountain would not have been grueling. In the dark, it felt like a challenge. The night was moonless, and no lights illuminated the stony path; no railings demarcated the drop offs. Gravel made some sections slippery. Stony steps eased the ascent in many places — except when the stairs were a foot tall. OSHA would not have approved.

After about 25 minutes, we made out the orange glow of what appeared to be campfires.

No wood or other obvious fuel was feeding them. The fires looked more than anything like what you see in a phony rock fireplace — burning quietly, small and controlled.The guidebooks say they can be extinguished by covering them, but they will pop up again nearby. Steve judged it to be a natural gas seep, mostly methane. The Greek myth is a lot more romantic, however. According to it, the lady monster had the head of a lion, the body of a goat, and the tail of a dragon. Mounted on the winged horse Pegasus, the hero Bellerophon killed the Chimaera by pouring molten lead into her mouth.

Steve and I spent about 20 minutes amidst the fires and the other visitors — a peaceable assembly who mostly gazed at the flames meditatively. A solitary ginger cat meandered among them (unusual for Turkey, which seems to have almost as many cats as people).I particularly admired the forethought of the guys who’d brought sticks and marshmallows, for toasting.

Fires seemed to stretch up the mountain into the distance. We sat down for a moment to drink in the scene. Cats have an uncanny ability to detect my cat allergies; sure enough, the ginger made a beeline for me and climbed into my lap.

It was time to move. We didn’t want to miss that 11 pm departure and we suspected that the dark descent would be harder than the climb up. It didn’t help that one of our flashlights died, and a spare from the bus dimmed to almost nothing. We made it.

Now I’m writing about it in another place I never expected to be: on the deck of a traditional Turkish gulet, a 2-masted sailing vessel iconic in this area. It’s even more wonderful than the magical mountain (but I’ll wait till the end of our cruise before trying to describe it).