We rolled into Göreme, the region's most popular town, on a Sunday morning, tired from a restless snooze on the night bus from Istanbul. We made our way through the little crowd of hotel owners offering lodging, and down a street full of restaurants and souvenir shops and ATV rental agencies to find our hotel.
Soft, white stone is the defining feature of the whole region. There are two major draws: the natural rock formations created by erosion, and the homes and churches that were carved out of the same stone by the Byzantine Greek population beginning in the tenth and eleventh centuries.
We were staying in a 'cave' hotel, which means that some of the rooms on offer have been carved out of soft volcanic rock to make a unique and atmospheric little room. It's a cute change of pace.
Göreme itself grew up around a collection of carved-out Byzantine churches that forms the Göreme Open Air Museum, which was our first stop while we waited to check into our cave room.
There are a number of individual churches and chapels as well as a monastery in the complex, all long-abandoned but well-preserved. They're each carved out of the cliff side and filled with artwork.
In some, the predominant art is primitive red ochre: lines and geometric shapes drawn in decorative patterns. But in others, there are full-colour frescoes of biblical stories and figures. The faces of the figures were largely smashed off in the following centuries, but in many of the churches, the colours are still clear and the designs are easy to interpret.
At the end of the string of churches is one nicknamed the 'Dark Church,' because no natural light enters the chamber, thus preserving the original, vivid colours of the frescoes, to incredible effect. From floor to ceiling and front to back, the church is covered in paintings, angular figures with black-outlined noses, wrapped in colourful robes set into a deep blue background. Here, too, many of the eyes have been gauged out, or the faces have been smashed off by rocks - some of the paintings are eerie in their facelessness, bright colour abruptly giving way to dull gray rock - but the room is beautiful and quiet.
That evening, we went for a short hike east from Göreme through the Rose Valley, a fertile little stretch of grape vines and dry shrubs and trees. On the way, we found many more abandoned cave houses, carved inside big conical formations and into ridges that swirl gently upwards like rosebuds.
At the collapse of the Ottoman empire, Turkey and Greece held a population exchange. The Capadoccia region was populated primarily by ethnic Greeks, some of whom were still living in the traditional carved-out homes, but few Turks came here to replace them. We wandered through a few of the homes - it's so hard to know if these were in use at the time of the population exchange, or of they'd already been abandoned for centuries. The empty, dusty shells defy all attempts to pinpoint a timeline. In places, we saw where the rock has given out and houses have collapsed, or half a room has tumbled two stories to the ground, exposing a perfect cross-section of this bizarre, ancient lifestyle.
We sat on a ridge above the Rose Valley and watched the sun sink over the horizon before making our way home along a ATV trail.
Th next day, we took an organized day trip - nice to get a full sampling of the region and let someone else do the planning, although being shuttled around in a convoy of mini-buses on identical tours is at most a once-in-a-while activity for me.
We admired the fairy chimney formations in Göreme from a viewpoint above the town, then drove an hour across Capadoccia to an underground city, carved out two thousand years ago and used for centuries in emergencies. When war struck the region, which was often given its position on the trade route to Asia, the entire population of each town would move into their respective underground labyrinths of tunnels for safety. They could stay for a year or more if necessary and subsequent generations tunneled deeper. This city was twelve floors deep: we squeezed down the long, short stairways to the eighth floor, deep in the cold earth.
We went on a short hike through a forested, shady canyon (so rare in this dry, dusty place!) and ate lunch at a riverside restaurant, then climbed through an ancient monastery carved into the side of a towering, rocky hill.
Our final day, we were booked into a night bus to the Mediterranean coast, so we decided to spend the day hiking to exhaust ourselves. We walked back through the Rose Valley, this time making our way past the grape vines to the adjacent Red Valley. By chance, Dan noticed an opening above us in the rock wall - through it, we could see St. John's cross carved into a ceiling. We found a dusty path hiding in the shrubs and scrambled up to find a church, certainly Byzantine and so certainly old, one room decorated with faded frescoes, all to ourselves.
We ate lunch in the cool inside of the church, examining the paintings and the carvings. Once, this place was covered in polished, gleaming white stone and in bright frescoes. Amazing.
We left the valley church and walked along the sweltering, shadeless highway to the Love Valley, famous for its tall, thin 'mushroom' formations... most of which look extremely phallic. (It is the Love Valley, after all.)
The rest of our hike took us through the aptly named White Valley and after a lot of backtracking, back to Göreme for a much-needed shower before loading onto the bus for the night.
S.
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