A Landscape Read as a Monster

Ancient and modern commentators alike have noticed that a place named Chimaera exists on the Lycian coast near Olympos, a hillside where natural gas vents burn continuously from cracks in the rock, still alight today and known locally as the Yanartas, the burning stone. Ancient writers including the geographer Strabo connect the monster's name and fire breathing directly to this site, and some ancient accounts describe the surrounding terrain as lion haunted at its base, goat grazed on its slopes and snake infested near its summit, a landscape whose three distinct characters may have supplied the three animal parts of the myth rather than the other way around. Whether the place explains the monster or a monster already current in story simply attached itself to a striking natural feature is not something the ancient sources resolve, but the association is old and was already treated as significant by classical geographers.

Beyond this one site, the Chimaera's composite, impossible body established a template later Greek and Roman art returned to repeatedly for other invented hybrids, and the word chimera has since passed into English generally for any fantastical creature stitched together from mismatched parts, or for a hoped for thing that turns out to be an illusion.