KANDYBA
(Gendeve) Lycia, Turkey.
On a
mountain top a two-hour walk W of Kasaba. The foundation was attributed in ancient times to a fictitious eponymous hero Kandybos, whose father Deucalion is represented on a coin of Kandyba of the reign of Gordian III.
The antiquity of the city is, however, proved by two
epitaphs in the Lycian language found on the site. Kandyba (in the corrupted form Kondyka) is ascribed by
Ptolemy to the Milyas, though it lies well outside the
limits of that region as defined by Strabo (
631). Pliny
(
HN 5.101) mentions “Kandyba, where the woodland
Eunias is highly spoken of.” Coins are very rare; two
specimens only seem to be known at present, both of the
time of Gordian III. Later, the bishop of Kandyba
ranked twenty-second of those in Lycia.
The site is now severely denuded and its monuments
broken or dilapidated. The acropolis, to which an ancient
road leads, is long and narrow, and enclosed by a ring
wall of mediaeval construction; in the interior Spratt believed he saw the ruins of a church. Otherwise the site
has nothing to show beyond a number of Lycian tombs
of house type, originally handsome but now much damaged, and some Lycian sarcophagi. A hollow in the hillside is suggestive of a theater, but of this there are no
visible remains.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
T.A.B. Spratt & E. Forbes,
Travels in
Lycia (1847) 90-95;
TAM II.3 (1940) 277; L. Robert
in
Hellenica 10 (1955) 219-22.
G. E. BEAN
