I am sitting in the Ottoman courtyard at Ruin Adalya in the old town of Antalya, drinking a tulip glass of black sweet tea and munching near-perfect baklava, and twenty feet beneath me the Romans are still there. That is to say, the Ottoman courtyard is paved with Lycian limestone but sections of it are now made of glass, and through the glass I can see the old Roman road. 

The disturbing truth about the National Association of Muslim Police

Kemi Badenoch responded to Henry Nowak’s murder with class

Why can’t Elon Musk leave Britain alone?

Which, as metaphorical launchpads go, will do very nicely. Yes, Antalya has, as many Brits know, fine beaches, serious resorts, agreeably cheap food and wine, and the odd Roman temple. But the history of this stretch of Mediterranean coast goes back further than that, and deeper, so much deeper. And I want to trace that extraordinary depth. 

First, though, I tour Antalya itself, which suffers a drab, outlying sprawl, but boasts a lovable medieval core with a dainty, restaurant-lined marina (try the sea bass after your meze). Best of all is the view from its clifftop gardens, across a glittery deep-blue Mediterranean to the shining ice-peaked Taurus mountains. This view is so absurdly lovely you can see why a classical king, in search of paradise, chose this place to build. It looks like Cadaques crossed with Lake Como, yet with the call to prayer as a soundtrack. I’d happily linger here for hours, with a jug of freshly squeezed, deliciously tart pomegranate juice, but I have those layers to descend. 

Half an hour east: the ancient city of Perge. Mythically founded in the twelfth century BC by Greeks returning from the Trojan War, various Macedonians, Hittites and Romans all built and worshipped here, even as Perge’s Hellenistic mathematicians defined the ellipse and the parabola. The centre of Perge’s main street is still dominated by a sequence of basins which were once a parade of majestic fountains, fed by a stream at the top of the hill. It is arguably more impressive, in terms of domestic planning, than anything built in Britain since about 1910. Then the river silted up, the Arab raiders came, and by the thirteenth century Perge was a ghost of a........

© The Spectator