Following the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–1922, and the subsequent Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, the town's Greek Orthodox residents were exiled from Livissi.

These former inhabitants were deprived of their properties and became refugees in Greece, or they died in Ottoman forced labour battalions (cf.

Following these events the Allied victors in World War I authorized the occupation of Smyrna, which still had many Greek inhabitants, by Greece in May 1919.

[4][5][full citation needed] The ghost town, now preserved as a museum village, consists of hundreds of rundown but still mostly standing Greek-style houses and churches which cover a small mountainside and serve as a stopping place for tourists visiting Fethiye and nearby Ölüdeniz.

Lebessus is mentioned as a Christian bishopric in the Notitia Episcopatuum of Pseudo-Epiphanius composed under the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius in about 640, and in the similar early 10th-century document attributed to Emperor Leo VI the Wise, as a suffragan of the metropolitan see of Myra, the capital of the Roman province of Lycia, to which Lebessus belonged.

[10] In 1917, families were sent in villages near Denizli, such as Acıpayam, through forced march of fifteen days, consisting mainly of the elderly, women and children, who had remained in the area.

During that death march, the roads were strewn with bodies of dead children and the elderly who succumbed to hunger and fatigue.

When this war ended in September 1922, the few remaining Greeks of Livissi and Makri were forced to abandon their homes and embark on ships to Greece.

Kayaköy is presumed to be the inspiration behind "Eskibahçe", the imaginary village chosen by Louis de Bernières as the setting of his 2004 novel Birds Without Wings.

In 2014, Kayaköy also took centre stage in the closing scenes of Russell Crowe's film The Water Diviner.

In Clive Cussler's novel The Navigator, the characters Kurt Austin and Carina Mechadi meet with a sculptor from Kayaköy, who says that he makes figurines that are based on a statue from a Lycian tomb on the Turkish Riviera.