Cappadocia: Selime Monastery & Wine

Selime Monastery was probably my favorite adventure of the trip. The guidebooks don't give it more than a passing mention (it's convenient to tours of the Ilhara) but I'm glad we took the time to stop. It is a monastery carved out of the rocks by monks in the 13th century and includes a large church, sleeping quarters, kitchen and stables. It also includes secret passageways, but the book doesn't say that. I love being outside and scrambling around, and I also love unplanned adventure. The main part of the complex itself has stunning views and of course interesting rooms cut out of the rock, but not terrifically different than another of other sites in the area. We were all poking our heads into dark corners and strange openings in the rock. Steven started scrambling up a little passageway at the back corner of the second story of a church and discovered that it kept going. Ash & I kicked off our flip-flops and we all scrambled up what turned out to be a series of twisting, ever-steeper rock stairways/ladders. We ended up about 400ft up in the top of one of the rock spires. The climb down was a bit nerve-wracking but definitely worth the views. I can't imagine the amount of work some monk put into carving these secret passageways out of solid rock!

Our last day we had various small adventures planned and stopped by Zelve Open Air Museum, Avanos (a small town know for its pottery), the Devrent Valley, and finally popped back into the town of Ürgüp after a rather ill-fated first attempt at wine tasting a couple days prior. The stars were aligned this time, and completely aside from the un-helpfulness of our guidebook we ended up at an adorable little tasting room. The proprietress foisted some wine on us to taste and it was surprisingly good. Her English was rather lacking so we didn't have much of an idea of what we were actually drinking but after the first couple tastes I was very impressed and grabbed one of the bottles she had been pouring out of.  Oh, it says 2000 on there. Is that a year? Pick up the next bottle. That says 1999. 'Guys, this is awesome!'. We ended up wandering her cellar and talking in the special language of gestures that only those who don't speak the same language can for an hour and left with 6 bottles of wine. We followed with a delightful little picnic in the countryside where we drank one bottle, and hauled the rest home.

Up next: Ephesus!

Cappadocia: Underground cities, & Ilhara Valley

The next two days in Cappadocia were a whirlwind of more fun.

First we visited the underground city of Derinkuyu. It goes down 11 stories and could hold between 30,000 - 50,000 people along with their livestock & food supplies. It was initially built in the 7th century BC, and expanded as time went on. Each level could be sealed off separately via rolling stone doors in case of invasion. Pretty neat stuff. You can only visit 7 levels & about 10% of the area b/c it hasn't all been excavated but you're free to roam & climb in the area that is open.

Ventilation shaft

Then we took a hike through the Ilhara Valley. One of my very favorite things about Turkey was the interface between history & nature. I really like history, but don't enjoy museums much. In Turkey, you can take a hike and stumble across caves, frescoes and churches from 2000+ years ago. Everywhere we went, you could enjoy the outdoors & experience history at the same time, all without the restraints of glass or rope to stand behind. The Ilhara Valley was a naturally beautiful place, but made doubly fun by the 30 rock churches spread throughout the valley.

P.S. We're having trouble with the comments. A number of people have said it either gave them error messages when they tried to leave a comment, or they left one but it never showed up.  Advice anyone?

Cappadocia: Fairy Chimneys & Frescoes

We spent the next three days in the Cappadocia region, which is in the center of Turkey. This was probably one of my favorite parts and we did a lot of fun things so I'm splitting it up a bit.

The region has a number of volcanoes, and explosions in ancient times coated the region with volcanic deposits. These eroded in odd ways and formed what are now known as 'fairy chimneys'. It's soft rock and people 2-3 thousand years ago carved it out in many places to form homes, churches, and monasteries. The region features heavily in the Bible if that's of interest to you (Cappadocia, Caeserea, etc) and was a center in the early church. Many rock churches from 100-300 AD are scattered about the region and are still decorated with the original frescoes.

It's hard to get a sense of scale from these small pictures but the crazy landscape goes on for probably 50 miles in every direction. Click on any of the pictures to make them bigger.

Our first day we visited Göreme Open Air Museum, which is essentially a regulated park where you can walk through some of the more impressive rock churches of the region.

Last supper, a little worse for the wear

After that we hiked/walked through the Rose Valley and the Red Valley from the museum to see some more of the spectacular scenery and then drove up to wander through some of the more impressive fairy chimneys. I'll let the pictures do most of the talking in this post.


Mini - hike:



Fairy Chimneys

Sweet Digs:

Rock Valley Pension, one of my favorite places we've stayed on our travels.