Cappadocia is the country of carved volcanic rock around Nevşehir, and most things to do there involve that rock: walking among the fairy chimneys, stepping into the painted churches of the Göreme Open Air Museum, going down into the underground cities of Kaymaklı and Derinkuyu, and following valleys such as Pigeon Valley, Zelve and Ihlara on foot. Göreme, thirteen kilometres from Nevşehir, is where the principal rock churches are gathered. Below, the sights are grouped by area so that neighbouring places can share a day; each has its own guide on this site with the visiting details.
Where Cappadocia is, and why it looks like this
The region runs from the Kızılırmak river in the north to the Hasan and Melendiz mountains in the south, between Yeşilhisar in the east and Aksaray in the west. Its rock is tuff, material thrown out in eruptions of Erciyes and Hasan mountains, later worn by wind and water into cones, ridges and valleys. The tuff is soft enough to carve, and a room cut into it keeps warm in winter and cool in summer, which is why the region has been lived in continuously since the Chalcolithic period.
Christianity gave the carving its best-known form. Basil of Caesarea brought the hermit's life here in the fourth century, and between the seventh and thirteenth centuries Christians escaping Arab raids settled around Göreme, hollowing out monasteries and churches that were painted with Gospel scenes once iconoclasm was over. The World Heritage listing reaches beyond Göreme to Kaymaklı, Derinkuyu, Soğanlı, the dovecotes of Karain, the church at Karlık and Yeşilöz's Theodoros Church, some of them an hour's drive from one another.
The Göreme Open Air Museum
The open-air museum gathers Göreme's principal churches within one boundary and on one ticket. Left of the entrance rises the Nunnery, a rock mass of six or seven storeys whose floors are linked by tunnels that rolling stone doors could seal. Further in are the Apple Church, the Sandal Church, the Church of St Basil and the chapel of St Barbara, its ornament drawn in red paint straight onto the bare rock. In the Snake Church, look for Saint Onuphrius, shown naked and long-haired behind a palm tree.
Two churches deserve the most time. The Dark Church, a late eleventh-century monastery, lets in so little daylight that its frescoes have come through in excellent condition. The Tokalı or Buckle Church, the biggest of Göreme's rock-cut churches, lies about fifty metres below the entrance but belongs to the same visit; the life of Christ runs around its walls in sequence, and its deep blues were made with lapis lazuli from Afghanistan. El Nazar, carved from a single free-standing cone in the valley towards Avcılar, has archaic eleventh-century paintings with touches of orange seen nowhere else.
Uçhisar, Pigeon Valley and the walk to Çavuşin
Uçhisar Castle is a high outcrop of steep rock six kilometres from Nevşehir, a natural fortress used in many periods; its guide calls Uçhisar the highest settlement in Cappadocia. From there Pigeon Valley runs four kilometres down to Göreme, named for the dovecotes cut along its sides: until the ninth century local people kept pigeons for their droppings, which manured the vineyards, and their eggs, which went into fresco plaster.
A longer walk starts at the Kızılçukur sunset terrace, reached from Ortahisar, and goes by the Üzümlü church, one of the few in Cappadocia painted before iconoclasm, through the Kızılçukur and Meskendir valleys to Çavuşin: about five kilometres, or three to four unhurried hours. Bring a torch for a 37-metre tunnel, and climb down the two iron ladders at the twenty-metre drop facing the rungs. The Çavuşin church, 2.5 kilometres out of Göreme along the Avanos road, was made in 964–965 after the emperor Nikephoros Phokas visited the region, and he, his wife Theophano and others of his household are painted among its Gospel scenes.
Zelve, Paşabağ and Avanos
A kilometre in from the Göreme–Avanos road, Paşabağ, once called the Valley of the Priests, is crowded with fairy chimneys, many with several bodies or heads; inside one of them are a chapel and a hermit's cell, both dedicated to St Simeon. Two kilometres off the same road lies Zelve, with the thickest cluster of chimneys in the region. Its three valleys were lived in until 1952, so beside churches and dovecotes there are houses, a mill and a mosque, a whole village carved rather than built.
Avanos, a kilometre from Zelve, has two museums. The Güray Museum is a ceramics collection cut twenty metres into the rock, billed as the world's first ceramics museum underground, with pottery from the Copper Age to the Ottomans and an open workshop where visitors can sit at a potter's wheel. The Cappadocia Living Heritage Museum, in a restored Ottoman mansion beside Şairler Sokağı, is about the region's crafts, cooking and customs. Fourteen kilometres from Avanos, the Özkonak underground city has holes about five centimetres wide bored between its floors to carry messages and air.
Ürgüp and the villages to its south
Five minutes from Ürgüp, the Three Beauties are three fairy chimneys of different heights, with a wooden walkway on the hill behind looking towards Mount Erciyes, popular at sunset. In Mustafapaşa, the Cappadocia Art and History Museum shows kitre dolls, figures modelled from tragacanth gum, in costumed scenes made by its founder Radiye Gül, and describes itself as Türkiye's first kitre doll museum.
About ten kilometres south-east of Ürgüp, in Yeşilöz, the Saint Theodore Church has an unusual trefoil plan, and its apse shows Christ enthroned between the Virgin, John the Baptist and two archangels in imperial dress. At Şahinefendi, Sobessos is the masonry of a small country town that grew from the fourth century AD; its bath has a mosaic pair of sandals at a threshold, a hint of where shoes were left. Mazı, eighteen kilometres south of Ürgüp, is an underground city with two levels open, entered past a large rolling stone door.
The underground cities
Kaymaklı, in the central district of Nevşehir, has eight levels, four of them lit and open; the stable sits on the first because animals were hard to take lower, and the wells have no link to the surface so that nobody could poison them. Derinkuyu, thirty kilometres from Nevşehir on the Niğde road, has eight cleared levels reaching about fifty metres down, with a church, a missionary school and stone wheels that could close a tunnel. Tatlarin, near Acıgöl, has two levels to walk, a lavatory, which underground cities rarely have, and a church with well-kept frescoes.
The church of St John at the entrance to Gülşehir is cut into one fairy chimney on two levels, and an inscription in its apse gives the year 1212. Its walls carry a Last Judgement, which the Ministry says was painted in very few Cappadocian churches, opening with an angel weighing souls while a winged devil pulls at the scales.
Further out: Ihlara, Selime, Güzelyurt and Soğanlı
The Ihlara Valley, in Aksaray province, is a canyon cut by the Melendiz stream into the volcanic layer of Hasan Dağı, up to 120 metres deep and fourteen kilometres long from Ihlara by way of Belisırma to Selime. You go down 382 steps to the green valley floor; of 105 churches, fourteen are open, among them Ağaçaltı, Sümbüllü and Kokar. At the Selime end, Selime Cathedral, which the portal calls Cappadocia's largest cathedral structure, is a three-aisled rock church with a fortress above it and a pyramid-shaped kitchen. In Güzelyurt, the Monastery Valley is a five-kilometre walk past rock-cut churches in the town where Gregory of Nazianzus worked in the fourth century.
Soğanlı, fifteen kilometres from Yeşilhisar in the corner where Kayseri, Niğde and Nevşehir meet, has around fifty rock churches, eight of them open, and the Ministry notes that its domed rock churches have no counterpart at Göreme, Zelve or Ihlara. Near Niğde, the Gümüşler Monastery is a courtyard monastery cut into one rock, with a room of hunting scenes the Ministry says is unique in Cappadocia.
