Sunday, 20 October 2013

Cave Men (and women!) in Cappadocia...



The Rose Valley

View from the Rose Valley

Clockwise from top left: The Love Valley; a fairy chimney cave; a valley full of caves

View over Cappadocia

Clockwise from top left: Fairy chimney caves; a crumbling multi-storey cave; a frescoed chapel inside a cave

Our next stop was Cappadocia – a beautiful region in central Turkey that is best known for it’s crazy unique geological rock formations, hot air balloons, and caves carved into rocks and cliffs.

We spent three days in the area, and could easily have spent a couple of weeks. It’s that kind of place…strikingly beautiful, but genuinely unique.

As we sit here to write this, we are realizing what a difficult place Cappadocia is to explain…it really is like nothing we’ve seen before.

The region is generally fairly flat, but consists of many shallow valleys in which the unique rock formations have evolved. Over the years, the rock has broken away from the cliffs to leave cone shaped ‘fairy chimneys’.

The most remarkable aspect of all this is that back in the day, rather than building conventional above-ground accommodation, the inhabitants of the area decided that it would be more practical to carve entire cities out of the cliff faces and fairy chimneys.

The scope and scale of the carved caves, houses and tunnels is almost impossible to grasp, but literally valley after valley was full of them, still in remarkably good condition. To this day you can still find dining tables, empty graves, church altars, frescoed walls, wine presses, and shelving, all carved out of the rock.

Not only did they love digging caves above ground, they also dug massive underground cities that were used primarily during the frequent times of war. We were fortunate to do a tour through one of them that descends eight stories below the ground and features over a hundred rooms and tunnels. It was quite remarkable to see the stables, churches, storage areas, kitchens, ventilation shafts, and stone doors that are still visible today.

Perhaps the other unique geological formation worth mentioning is the rather suggestive shaped rocks that are ironically situated in the Love Valley. Between the four us, they certainly provided a bit of a giggle :)



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