Page 33 - Sarpedon’dan Keykubad’a Bir Zamanlar Antalya

A person who came to Lycia by escaping from Salakia by
chance sees the chest, which reaches the shores of Lycia with
the current it is caught, and takes it from the sea. Realizing the
situation by seeing the biscuits as soon as he opened the chest,
the man from Salakia ignited all the biscuits, fulfilling the young
girl’s vow, and dedicating the entire Lycian peninsula to Apol-
lon. Since the name of the chest where the biscuits are kept is
“Patara” in the Lycian language, the coast where the chest is
located and the area behind it are called “patara”, which means
box chest in Greek from that day.
According to another myth, the hero Danaos, king of Argos,
consulted Apollo one day and the god Apollo made a prophecy
to the king. So much so that he tells him to keep going until he
sees a wolf and a bull fighting each other. In the continuation of
his words, Apollo ends his prophecy by saying that if the bull
wins, he will build a temple to Poseidon, and if the wolf wins, he
will attribute the temple to himself, that is, to Apollo. Upon this
prophecy of Apollo, when the hero Danaos, who set out from
Argos, reached the country of Lycia, when he saw a bull and
a wolf fighting, he stayed where he was and watched the fight.
So much so that the wolf wins this tough fight, and King Danaos
both has an Apollo temple built at this point and establishes Pa-
tara (Işın 1999; Işık 2011;2019; Bönish-Meyer 2019; Koçak 2020).
Excavations in the ancient city of Patara, located in the Gele-
mis Town of Kaş, were carried out by Akdeniz University arche-
ology faculty member Prof. Dr. Fahri Işık.
It is today under the chairmanship of Prof. Dr. Havva Işık.

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