Letoon Sanctuary Place

This guide to the Letoon Sanctuary near Muğla opens with an ancient tale from sixth-century-BC Lycia: peasants gathered around a marsh spring where Leto, mother of Apollo and Artemis, stopped exhausted to drink, and deliberately fouled the water in front of her. It follows how that spot became sacred ground and, by the second century BC, the official religious center of the entire Lycian League, with temples built there to Leto and her children. Excavation only began at the site in 1962, and the temple in front of you was pieced back together decades later from blocks pulled out of the marsh mud.