Adatepe

Exquisitely preserved ADATEPE lies just over 4km northeast of Küçükkuyu; look carefully on the main highway for the small sign indicating the village and its “Zeus Altarı”, a fifteen-minute marked walk from the approach road. This is merely a carved rock platform with a cistern, though the views from the top of the steps are superb. Adatepe has appeared in TV serials and (unlike Yeşilyurt) enjoys statutory protection for its architecture, with some stone houses all but sprouting from volcanic boulders. Again unlike Yeşilyurt, it was ethnically mixed from the 1850s, when in the wake of a killing frost, cash-strapped olive-oil magnates paid their Greek workers with a grant of fields and building plots in the lower quarter, though the Orthodox church on the plane-tree plaza was destroyed after 1923.