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About the forming of Landscape and History of Cappadocia

“ Cappadocia is a region of volcanic tuff, basalt and andesite rock. When the volcanic activity ceased some 600 000 years ago erosion began to to abrade the softer soil and the harder stone started to emerge.During this process , in some areas layers of 100 meters of tuff were covered by occasional deposits of lava composed of of harsh basalt.Over thousands of years, rainwater draining through cracks began to wear away the soft layers of tuff, while the winds with the warming and cooling air, assisted the erosion. It was in this manner that cones embedded to mushroom like shapes eventually formed on the tops of hills that were not affected by the erosion.Today what we observe with such an admiration  have been named “ fairy chimneys”. The layers of tuff that were not covered with basalt were subject through formation through erosion and were transferred into the valleys that extend one after the other, and eventually into canyons, one more beautiful than the other.....”

From the book, Cappadocia by Turgay Tuna, Bulent Demirdurak, Third Edition July 2013,BGK, Istanbul.

The Cappadocia region has a long history with the first  findings about Human presence dating back to 10 000 BC in Çatalhöyük, and the Aşıklıhöyük near the Ihlara Valley in Nevşehir. Throughout it’s history the area was the home of several civilizations and the subject of invasion starting from Hittites, to Persians, Macedonians, the Byzantine and Seljuk Turks and finally to Ottomans. After Jesus was crucified, his apostles started spreading out  and several churches, monasteries and underground cities were built in Cappadocia during the Byzantine era. Later when in the fourth century the persecution of Christians began these underground cities and monasteries carved in to the rocky hills of Cappadocia  became a safe heaven for the believers. In the following century Cappadocia became the magnet of Christian activity and several of the priest who served there were to be elevated to sainthood.

After a good nights sleep we woke up around 7 am to get ready for the trip to Cappadocia. Cappadocia is the name of the region in central Anatolia which includes the provinces of Kayseri, Aksaray, Nevşehir, Kirşehir, and Niğde. The area we are going to visit with the unusual landscape of fairy chimneys, underground cities, caves, valleys and canyons are in the small cities of Ürgüp and Göreme in the Nevşehir province. We opted to stay in the Ürgüp area at a small village called Mustafapaşa and had made reservations over the internet. We had discussed our plans and gave our friends  three hotel names in the area we liked and   they had decided on the Art Cave Hotel in Mustafapaşa, Ürgüp, a boutique hotel with only 9 rooms.

The distance between Eskişehir and Ürgüp is about 350 miles and we calculated with our breakfast stop and pit stops to arrive in Ürgüp in about seven hours.We left around 8:30, Sezen driving her BMW and Ilhan navigating without a GPS or a map. In about an hour, outside the city limits of Eskişehir we stopped at an outdoor restaurant by the highway. The breakfast was a typical village breakfast : Freshly made yogurt, so thick that you can cut with a knife and serve without spilling, crumbled village feta,  kaşar  cheese , (similar to Romano  but not as sharp), pure honey in comb, almonds and tea to drink. Ilhan and  I also ordered pan fried  sunny side up eggs with the sucuk, the spicy Turkish beef sausage. Fresh homemade thin slices of pita bread accompanied the breakfast  items. After refreshing myself in the restrooms, a funny thing happened while I was returning to the table. Sitare and Sezen had gone to the gift shop and Ilhan was still sitting at the table.In Eskişehir he had purchased our plane tickets for our return trip from Kayseri to Bodrum and I owed him 300 TL, roughly $ 150. I took the 300 TL out of my wallet and as I was reaching the table from his back I said : "Here is the money I owe you for the plane tickets", handing him the money. The man turned towards me with a strange look in his face, he had a similar plaid shirt on him just like Ilhan but he was not the man I owed the money to. Of course I apologized and put the money back to my pocket. Ilhan was sitting about four tables away. This time I made sure I was face to face with him before taking the money out of my pocket.

Not happy with the rest rooms on the last stop we stopped soon for a second time in a small city with a nice gas station with a convenience store and with nice clean bathrooms. Afterwards Sezen really started pushing the gas pedal hard and around 3:00 pm we passed through Ürgüp stopping at a nice restaurant for lunch and in another fifteen minutes later we were in Mustafapaşa searching for the Art Cave Hotel. Mustafapaşa is an amazing little town with almost a mountain like small peak and several hills full of caves and homes and hotels inside the caves. In the city center there were direction signs of the boutique hotels in the form of arrows, all with the same surname of " Cave" and a different first name. Ours read : Cave Art Hotel of Cappadocia and it was on top the highest peak with a gravel road of a 60 degree slope. There was no way a car going up and another one coming down could pass through the narrow road, let alone our SUV had difficulty going up without not trying to scrape the brick walls in the alleys. On midway to the top we made a wrong turn, there was a an old  unused horse wagon blocking our way. Sezen was tired  and understandably upset now and to turn the car back from the dead end she had to make at least eight or nine maneuvers before she drove it all the way up the hill to a small parking space. We got out of the car and walked down to the Art Cave Hotel about 25 yards down the hill.

We skipped the sunset since we were tired , made a small tour of the city: the caves of the village, the Greek Church, the Village Mosque with in addition to the minaret a bell tower looking extension on it's roof , the Asmali Mescit House; the place where  the popular Turkish TV series was shot, purchased some extra time for my cell phone from a convenient store and finally settled down at a small restaurant in the back alley of the old church at  Heleni's. We ordered some vegetable mezes and patates tava (french fries), wıth a small bottle of the usual spirit  for three of us and a bottle of  Efes Beer for Sitare. A huge Kangal type of street dog was laying quietly by us and watching the strangers in town.

To tour Cappadocia with your own car and not knowing  where you are going and without the knowledge about the surrounding areas, is an impossible task. Typically you use the services of a travel agency with a tour guide and their transportation in mini vans. At first we thought it was a little pricey: around $ 60 per person per day, but then after finishing the first day’s tour we knew that every penny we spent was worth it. Hiro Tour Tourism & Travel Agency had so much to offer and so many things to show, that was difficult to believe we had experienced in one single day.

While everybody was taking a shower, I went up the terrace to have a  bottle of water when I saw Oya Hanim, the owner operator of the Hotel, all dressed up and getting ready for the big event which was going to take place at the old church in town. The Patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew was going to conduct  a sermon. I knew people were coming all the way from Greece for this event which was considered a pilgrimage and as the editor of istanbullite.com this was a great opportunity to witness and take pictures of  the sermon and his Holliness. Oya Hanım was going to take her car to the to church, so I asked if I can join her, letting my wife know where I was going .The Aios Konstantini -Eleni Greek Orthodox Church is in the marketplace of Mustafapaşa  the old Rum (Anatolian Greek) village.The church was abandoned during the 1924 population exchange between Turkey and Greece and looked like no restoration was done since then. We went down the stairs to the Church which was under the street level. The  place was already getting full when we arrived and we both went our separate ways  inside,looking for seats. I found a seat at the  back entrance of the church and started watching the priests in black robes, eagerly waiting for Patriarch by the door. Soon there were no seats left and I volunteered to give my seat to an elderly gentleman who had difficulty in walking as the Patriarch was entering from the door with a cortege of people around him.  All three priests greeting him reached  out and kissed his hand as he walked towards the table with candles which had Jesus‘s fresco next to it. He leaned and kissed the picture, moving towards where I was standing. Two priests helped him to put a black cloak over his head from the back towards his shoulders and then the ceremonial  purple cloak with gold lining. He moved forward touching the old man I had just given my seat, by the shoulders and moved to the pulpit and started delivering his prayers in Greek. After listening to him for few minutes  I waved bye to Oya Hanim and returned back to the Hotel. We had one more event scheduled for this long day.

This morning the driver of the tour van picked us up from our hotel and brought us to Ürgüp where we transferred to a larger minibus. There were ten more tourists in addition to us four, mostly very young people and all from Korea. Our tour guide had also changed, his name was Ahmet and he spoke English with a very heavy accent whom first even I had difficulty understanding. He had learned the language most likely by himself by reading books and pronouncing the words and letters the way they sound in Turkish. But soon after we got used to his pronunciation and I realized that he actually had a good volume of vocabulary, communicated well with the tourists and was very knowledgeable about his subjects. He was a good entertainer too, and tried to teach the tourists about ten Turkish words which they had to repeat after him while we were travelling. Our first stop was on a hill by the pigeon valley at a very scenic spot with gift shops selling artifacts  and souvenir items. After fifteen minutes of  free time we went back to our Mercedes minibus and headed to Derinkuyu, the biggest Underground city in the area.

There are a total of 36 known underground cities in Cappadocia, 9 of them are open to public : the biggest being Derinkuyu(deep well), followed by Kaymaklı. The underground cities were used as a safe heaven by the early Christians to hide from their enemies and to practice their religion. However it is believed that much earlier civilizations ,like the Hittites and Phrygians started excavating the underground cities and using the first first or second stories and then later civilizations adding more stories to them as the need arose. The Derinkuyu is eight stories deep, has a ventilation hole with dozens of shafts and is about 70 to 80 meters in length. As the name suggests, there was probably a well at the eighth storey, since the water wells were that deep in this area. Derinkuyu has a 9 km long tunnel going towards Kaymakli but the two are not connected. Typically the first floors under the earth were used as animal shelters, the second one as a kitchen and food storage area, the third and fourth stories as hiding areas . The doors to the hiding areas were closed with a round one piece stone, weighing about half a ton, which could be opened only from the inside. The lower floors usually had meeting rooms, wine cellars and water wells. On the eighth floor of Derinkuyu there is a church in form of cross, in the size of a large room and with eight feet high ceilings.

When we started going down from the entrance to the first story, the tunnel was pretty large and well lid. But as all fifteen of us followed each other one behind the other, the corridors got tighter, at places less than 5 feet in height, and the lights got dimmer. I was telling Sitare to put her hands above her head since we were constantly hitting our heads on the ceiling walls. The traffic going up and coming down obviously could not pass through the same corridor at the same time, so Ahmet our tour guide would yell at the foyer of each corridor:

" 15 coming down there, is anybody coming up.?"

Our next stop was in Selime by the Aksaray province, a high and hilly hard rock area with a  green valley and village underneath.There is one of the biggest monasteries on the high point of the region dating back the 8. Century, the Selime Cathedral. The cathedral which has two sets of columns and ten rooms inside with frescoes dating back to 11.Century, was also used as a military watch point not only by the Christians but also the Selçuk Turks in the centuries to follow. Sezen and Ilhan decided not to go up the rocky hill, but we started climbing on the hard surface all the way up to the Cathedral. Going down from top was more difficult than climbing up and required lot of concentration to prevent sliding and falling down. We met with  our tour group down at the valley  afterwards and went to the outdoors restaurant for lunch. The restaurant was in a camping ground by a little river with ducks swimming in it, a little bridge on top, and  willow trees  all around the area. The menu consisted of fresh baked country bread, bulgur pilaf, çoban salad, watermelon and sea bass baked in a clay dish. And of course Turkish coffee or çay at the end. It was yumm...

The other major place to visit on our itinerary today was the Ihlara Valley here in the Aksaray province, very close to the village of Selime. One of the most beautiful canyons in the  world, Ihlara runs 14 kilometers in a rocky train between steep hills which are 100-150 meters in height. The Melendiz stream flows through the valley, merging to the Uluırmak (Great River) in Aksaray and eventually running into the Tuz Gölu (Salt Lake) between Ankara and Izmir.

Our minivan brought us to the top of the valley where we started walking down the road to the front entrance of the park. Scanning our museum passes on the scanner we went in and started walking down the wooden stairs from the highest point of the Canyon to the valley, where the Melendiz stream was flowing.  At some points of the 400 steps going down to the river there were panoramic  observation decks, where we stopped and  took pictures of the canyon. Down in the valley we passed over a small bridge and went to other shore and started hiking to the midpoint of the 8 km long walkable trail. We walked up the hills and rocks by the river between acacia, willow and walnut trees, surrounded between yellow and blue wild flowers. Birds were singing on the trees, ducks were  swimming in the river and we were following each other in a single row.

There were once 105 churches hidden in the Ihlara Canyon, most of them had disappeared under debris and erosion of centuries long neglect. Here early Christians were practicing their religion safely from all enemies and contrary to the monks, they were living by the river in communes together with other people. St Gregory known for his interpretation of the Holy Trinity, which was accepted at the Council of Nicea in 325 A.D., had lived here at the Ihlara Canyon. There are still 15 churches inside the rocks with beautiful frescoes; some with traces of oriental art, others with Byzantine touches. Among these churches, we  visited the Ağaçaltı Church, or Church of Daniel Pantanassa, where Ahmet our tour guide gave us a very detailed information about the frescoes on it’s dome : Jesus’s  Ascension to heaven, all of the Saints, the Annunciation, Baptism and Assumption of Virgin Mary to the heaven. Getting out of the church we kept walking down and then back climbing again by the river, on the rocks , off the hılls, and so on.... At this point everybody was getting tired from the whole day's activities, the temperature was reaching 90 F, although the humidity level was comfortable. Ahmet, who was blamed for the long walk, grabbed Sitare’s  heavy handbag in an act of gesture and volunteered to carry it for the rest of the way.  We stopped at the midpoint of the trail at a rest area and tea garden right by the Melendez stream. We enjoyed refreshments there, sitting on a low Ottoman sedir, watching ducks swimming in the water and later walked  to tour our minivan, waiting for us in the parking lot.

The day was fınally coming to an end but we still had about an hour’s drive back to Ürgüp and then back to our hotel. On the way back we stopped at another panoramic spot by Ortahisar, taking some final photos and selfies in Cappadocia we went back to the minivan. But we were not done yet. Our last stop was at a marble and gemstones shop, where a stone carver demonstrated how the stones were cut, formed and treated from a piece of rock. When he finished polishing the little egg figure he worked on, the sales lady asked our group of fourteen if anybody knew what the word " Cappadocia" meant. She was going to give the little marble egg on the pedestal to who ever answered her question right. Without hesitation I answered :

"The land of beautiful Horses. "

Congratulating me for the right answer she handed over the little gift.

"Once in a while your knowledge brings some benefits" said Sitare.

Our destination was Bodrum, the famous resort city on the Aegean Sea