Göreme National Park

Central Anatolia seems to have been sculpted rather than formed. Millions of years ago the volcanoes of the region buried the plateau under thick beds of ash, which hardened into soft tuff, and in places a lid of harder lava settled on top. Wind, rain and frost have been working on this layered cake ever since, and around Göreme the result is a landscape of pale cones, ribbed cliffs, tent-shaped rocks and the famous "fairy chimneys" — slender columns still wearing a darker capstone that shields the soft rock beneath. The park covers close to 100 square kilometres of this terrain, and the colours shift with the light from cream and rose to ochre and grey.

What makes the valleys extraordinary is that people moved into the rock. From the 4th century small groups of hermits cut cells into the tuff, and over time these were linked into monastic communities with chapels, refectories and storerooms carved rather than built. The area around Göreme is said to have held some 400 churches. Many of them were painted: some decoration goes back to the 6th and 7th centuries, while the most accomplished cycles belong to the 10th and 11th. The cluster now presented as the Göreme Open Air Museum holds the best of them. The Dark Church, cut in the late 11th or early 12th century, received so little daylight through its single small window that its frescoes kept their deep reds, ochres and blues remarkably intact; the Apple Church and the Snake Church, named after a dragon-slaying scene, sit a few steps away.

Look closely at the rock faces and you notice how much of the landscape is architecture: doorways high above ground, stairways worn into the stone, dwellings still in use or turned into hotels. In 1985 UNESCO inscribed the area as "Göreme National Park and the Rock Sites of Cappadocia", one of the relatively few sites listed for both natural and cultural value. Sunrise is the classic hour, when the pale spires catch the first light and dozens of hot-air balloons drift over the valleys.

Getting there

The park spreads around the village of Göreme; the town of Ürgüp lies about 5 km from its edge. The nearest airport is Nevşehir Kapadokya Airport (NAV), about 32 km away, with transfers to the villages of the park. Once there, the valleys are best explored on foot.