Page 20 - Sarpedon’dan Keykubad’a Bir Zamanlar Antalya

come a river, which feeds the Eşen Plain today. They call this
river Xanthos, meaning yellow, just like the blond-haired god
Apollo. It takes its name from God. So much so that his mother
Leto built a temple on the banks of the Xanthos stream for her
only son Apollo. From that day, the people of Lycia called the
river Xanthos Patroos, that is, they worshipped the heritage of
their chief god Apollo in the form of the river (Tüner-Önen 2017, 355).

“In the place where Leto, wife of Zeus, who thundered the heav-
ens, uncovered the hard soil of famous Lycia with her hands
while writhing in labor pains when she gave birth to her children,
where Neoptolemus, who grew up next to the beautiful streams
of Xanthos in Lycia, killed Laodamas”
(Quint. 11.20-26)

Leto in Lycia with her children, escaped the wrath of Hera,
stopped at the edge of a water to wash their children, who were
polluted in birth, and to rest. However, the villagers living there
did not want Leto and her twin children here, so they mixed up
mud in the water. Angered by this, the goddess with her curse
turns the villagers, who lack hospitality, into frogs that will live in
muddy waters forever. Then, through the guidance of the sur-
rounding wolves, she finds clear water and bathes her children
there. Here, when the wolves led her, the goddess changed the
name of Tremilai as Lycia. From that moment on, they decide
to live in Lycia, a mother and two child gods. However, they
did not come to a very foreign place. This because before that,
Leto was known in Lycia. For the Lycians, Lata meant “woman”
in Lycian, and the Luwians, also one of the Bronze Age peoples
of Anatolia, also from the 3rd millennium BC, called the beauti-
ful-haired goddess “annis massanassis”, that is, “mother of the
gods” (Işık 2010, 75; Atik-Korkmaz 2016, 186).

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