Selime Cathedral

At the northern end of the Ihlara Valley a ridge of soft volcanic tuff rises above the village of Selime, and inside it is the largest rock-cut church in Cappadocia. Known as Selime Cathedral, it is the heart of a monastic complex carved straight into the cliff, with halls and chambers set on two storeys and the upper part shaped like a fortress above the valley floor.

The cathedral is hollowed out as a full basilica: two rows of columns, left standing in the living rock, divide the interior into three aisles, a layout borrowed from built churches and translated into carved stone. The monastery is generally dated to the 8th and 9th centuries, while the wall paintings that survive inside are later, from around the late 10th and early 11th centuries. Among the scenes that can still be made out are the Ascension of Christ and images of the Virgin Mary, painted directly onto the smoothed tuff.

Selime marks the end of a much larger sacred landscape. The Ihlara Valley is a canyon about 14 km long cut by the Melendiz stream, up to 120 m deep in places, and from the 4th century onwards it became one of the great monastic centres of Byzantine Cappadocia, its walls lined with painted churches such as Kokar, Sümbüllü and Yılanlı. The complex at Selime, believed to have served as a place where clergy were trained, is the most monumental of them and is now run as a museum site under the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism. The surrounding cones and cliffs, eroded into chimneys and hollows, give the monastery the setting of a rock city as much as a church.

Getting there

Selime lies in the Güzelyurt district of Aksaray province, about 22 km from the city of Aksaray. The nearest airport is Nevşehir Kapadokya Airport (NAV), roughly 58 km away in a straight line. The village of Ihlara, at the other end of the valley, is about 8 km to the south.