Guide
The two areas covered here sit close together off the Göreme–Avanos road and are visited as a pair. Paşabağları, once known as the Valley of the Priests, lies a kilometre in from the right-hand side of the road and is filled with fairy chimneys of a kind found almost nowhere else: many of them multi-bodied and multi-headed, several hollowed out into chapels and living rooms. One of the three-headed cones holds a chapel and a hermit's cell dedicated to St Simeon.
Zelve, two kilometres in from the same road, has the densest concentration of fairy chimneys in the region. Three valleys meet here, and between the 9th and 13th centuries they formed one of the important settlement and religious centres of Cappadocian Christianity — the Ministry notes that the first seminars for priests in this area were given here. The Balıklı, Üzümlü and Geyikli churches are the most significant of its churches, and in the third valley the dovecotes cut into the slopes are hard to miss.
What makes Zelve different from the purely monastic sites nearby is that people went on living in it until 1952. The valley therefore holds monasteries and churches alongside houses, a tunnel, a mill and a mosque — the ordinary fabric of a village, carved rather than built. Nevşehir city centre is twenty kilometres away and Avanos one kilometre; the site can be reached by private car or on the day tours run by travel agencies.
