Patara is eighteen kilometres of undeveloped sand on the Lycian coast of southwestern Türkiye, and the way you get to the water runs through a capital the dunes swallowed. The road in passes beneath a triple-arched gate raised around 100 AD. It looks like a victory arch and was built as the end of an aqueduct: water from the hills ran over your head and spilled into a basin on the far side. Beyond it the theatre seated 6,000 on thirty-four rows, with a two-storey stage building still standing below, and sand had filled it nearly to the top before anyone cleared it out. From the back row you can see exactly what the city lost to. Behind that line of dunes sat the parliament of the Lycian League. Twenty-three towns sent delegates to the semicircular chamber, each casting one, two or three votes according to the size of the place he came from. Montesquieu praised the arrangement, and Hamilton cited him while arguing for an American union. It has been rebuilt, and you can sit on the tiers.
The lighthouse has come back out of the sand too. Raised under Nero, it stood for fourteen centuries until the earthquake and tsunami of 1481 brought it down and the dunes closed over the pieces. Excavators dug out some 2,500 of its own blocks, worked out where each had sat, and stacked the tower back up. Past the boardwalk there is a café and then nothing at all. Twenty minutes along the sand the footprints stop, and the dune field runs on ahead with the surf beside it. That sand has not finished moving: the wind drives it inland year after year, and fences now stand between the dunes and the excavated city. What it buries now is eggs. Loggerheads haul out to nest from May, peaking in June and July, and whether a hatchling comes out male or female is not in its genes but in the temperature of the sand it incubates in. Warm nests give females, cool nests males: the sand decides.