Letoon Sanctuary

Letoon was the sanctuary of all Lycia and the federal centre of the league of cities; it lies four kilometres from Xanthos, right by the river floodplain. According to legend, Leto, pursued by Hera, stopped here to give water to the newborn Apollo and Artemis; shepherds drove her away, and the goddess turned them into frogs. Three temples stand in a row on the terrace: the largest is dedicated to Leto, the middle one to Artemis and the third to Apollo, and the last of these has preserved a mosaic with a bow, a quiver and a lyre. The temple of Leto was built in the second century BC; it is Ionic and peripteral, and in recent years archaeologists have raised part of its columns and cella walls back into place. It was here too that the trilingual stone was found, with a text in Greek, Lycian and Aramaic, which helped to make sense of Lycian writing. Nearby lies a nymphaeum with permanently standing water, where frogs do indeed live, and a Hellenistic theatre with vaulted entrances. The site is on the UNESCO list together with Xanthos. The grounds of the sanctuary are small, and a circuit of them takes less than an hour. French archaeologists have been excavating here since the 1960s, and the work has hardly been interrupted.

On the map