A ghost town in Turkey that draws numerous tourists gives insight into ancient villages of long ago. Centuries ago, Kayakoy was home to Greek-speaking Christian subjects and Turking-speaking Muslim Ottoman rulers who lived in harmony until the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-1022 when the town’s Greek Orthodox residents were exiled. The Greeks called the village Levissi while the Turks called it Kayakoy. At the start of the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922), Kayakoy was already nearly empty of residents. When this war ended in September 1922, the few remaining Greeks of Livissi and Makri were forced to abandon their homes and set sail on ships to Greece. Some of them founded the refugee settlement of Nea Makri outside of Athens. Muslims from Greece did not inhabit Kayaköy because of its hillside location, which they found too remote. Many of the town’s empty buildings were damaged in the 1957 Fethiye earthquake. Now a museum village, Kayakoy features hundreds of rundown Greek-style houses and church dotting a mountainside. A few houses have been restored and are inhabited. More than 20 churches and chapels were built in the village long ago, which boasted a population of 10,000. Around 500 houses remain as ruins and are under the protection of the Turkish government, including two Greek Orthodox Churches, which remain the most important sites of the ghost town. The Upper Church, originally called Taxiarchis, was constructed on a prominent hill in the center of the settlement. The Lower Church, originally called Panagia Pirgiotissa on the western border of the settlement, has survived to the present day in a better state of preservation. The building was used as a mosque until the 1960s and the atrium is covered with pebble mosaics like what is found in the Upper Church. There is a private museum that highlights the history of the town and in the middle of the village stands a fountain that dates from the 17th Century. In 2014, Kayaköy also took center stage in the closing scenes of Russell Crowe‘s film The Water Diviner. The 30-cm WorldView-4 image featured here was collected on May 1, 2018, and has custom processing and color balance applied by Apollo Mapping. (Satellite Imagery © 2024 Maxar Technologies)In this monthly article, we travel the world to check out unique, fun and sometimes a bit weird 30-centimeter (cm) color imagery samples from the WorldView constellation. In November, we marveled over images of the Dubai Miracle Garden in the United Arab Emirates. For this edition of the 30-cm Color WorldView Image of the Month, we feature images of Kayakoy, Turkey.
30-cm WorldView-3 (WV3) launched in late 2014, WorldView-4 (WV4) launched in late 2016 and then the first WorldView Legion satellites launched in 2024. Taken together, this is the most advanced satellite constellation the commercial marketplace has ever had access to. Here are a few of the features that really set these satellites apart from the competition:
- Improved Resolution
- Higher resolution means you can see more detail in WorldView imagery.
- Data collected at nadir will have 31-centimeter (cm) panchromatic, 1.24-meter (m) visible and near infrared, 3.7-m SWIR (WV3 only) and 30-m CAVIS (WV3 only) bands.
- Additional Spectral Bands
- If spectral analysis is part of your project, then no other satellite can match WorldView-3 and WorldView Legion with their 8 bands of visible and near-infrared data; and then 8 shortwave infrared bands (WV3 only) which are crucial for geological studies.
- Better Positional Accuracy
- With accuracies of 3.5-m CE90% or better (without ground control even!), the 30-cm WorldView constellation has no rivals for its enhanced positional accuracy.
- Daily Revisits
- With multiple WorldView-3 and WorldView Legion satellites orbiting our planet, daily revisits are available for most locations.
- WV4 is no longer collecting new imagery.
- Increased Collection Capacity
- WV3/4 feature 13.1-km swath widths (at nadir) with the ability to collect up to 680,000 square kilometers (sq km) of high-resolution data per day per satellite (though WV4 is dead now).
- When fully launched, WorldView Legion will feature six 30-cm satellites, significantly boosting the collection capacity of this leading high-resolution constellation.
If you are interested in WorldView-3, WorldView-4 and/or WorldView Legion imagery for your next project, please let us know by phone, 303-993-3863, or by email, sales@apollomapping.com.
You can also find more WV3 samples and technical information on our website here; WV4 samples and information can be found here; and then finally here is more information about WorldView Legion.
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